THE    LIFE   AND    POETRY    OF  JAMES   THOMSON 


PUBLISHED   FROM  THE   FUND 

PRESENTED  TO    THE  UNIVERSITY    BY  THE 

1914    AND     1915    EDITORIAL    BOARDS    OF    THE 

YALE    BANNER    AND    POT    POURR1 


EDITORS    FOR    THE   CLASS  OF    1914 

WATSON    SMITH     HARl'HAM  JOHN     GUTHRIE     KII.DRETH 

HENRY     WISH     HOIISON  SCOTT     HURTT    l'ARADISE 

EDITORS   FOR  THE  CLASS  OF   1915 

WILLIAM    HUNTING    JE8SUP  JOHN    CARLISLE    PEET 

BOYLSTON     ADAMS    TOMPKINS 


THE   LIFE  AND   POETRY   OF 

JAMES    THOMSON 

(S.  V.) 

BY   J.    EDWARD    MEEKER,   M.A. 


"Sunt  lacrymae  rerum, 
et  men  tern  mortalia  tangunt" 


NEW   HAVEN:    YALE  UNIVERSITY   PRESS 

LONDON:    HUMPHREY  MILFORD 

OXFORD  UNIVERSITY   PRESS 

MDCCCCXVII 


Copyright,  1917 
By  Yale  University  Press 


First  published,  February,  1917 


TO 

GEN.   HENRY   A.   BISHOP 

THIS  BOOK  IS  AFFECTIONATELY  DEDICATED 

BY  THE  AUTHOR 


FOREWORD 

Thomson's  curious  pen  name  "B.  V."  is  derived 
from  the  initials  of  Bysshe  (the  middle  name  of 
his  beloved  Shelley),  and  of  Vanolis  (an  anagram 
upon  the  German  "Novalis") .  It  was  as  "B.  V." 
rather  than  as  James  Thomson  that  the  poet  was 
known  to  his  own  generation  of  readers.  The 
present  generation,  however,  has  exhibited  more 
curiosity  if  not  more  sympathy  toward  the  per- 
sonality of  Thomson.  So  close  a  connection  exists 
between  the  poet's  life  and  his  poems,  that  the 
reader  can  scarcely  comprehend  the  latter  while 
in  ignorance  concerning  the  former.  This  has 
been  especially  true  since  Mr.  Salt's  lengthy  biog- 
raphy became  almost  unobtainable.  The  present 
volume  is  novel  chiefly  in  the  fact  that  more  than 
the  few  previous  sketches  of  Thomson's  life  it 
attempts  a  close  correlation  of  "B.  V.'s"  life  and 
his  poems. 

The  author  must  confess  to  having  made  free 
with  Mr.  Salt's  book,  as  well  as  Mr.  Dobell's 
valuable  Memoir,  and  much  contemporary  peri- 
odical criticism.  The  over-curious  reader  may 
even  detect  passages  where  the  present  author  has 
despaired  of  improving  upon  the  phrases  of  his 
predecessors,  but  has  forgotten  always  to  desig- 

[  ix  ] 


FOREWORD 

nate  them  by  scrupulous  quotation  marks.  The 
author  at  any  rate  cheerfully  admits  this  clerical 
fallibility,  and  would  not  churlishly  grudge  any 
higher  student  of  English  his  lonely  glee  in  dis- 
covering such  cases. 

The  author  wishes  to  acknowledge  his  indebted- 
ness in  the  preparation  of  the  present  volume  to 
Mr.  E.  Byrne  Hackett,  formerly  director  of  Yale 
University  Press,  for  invaluable  suggestions  and 
encouragement;  and  to  Professors  C.  M.  Lewis 
and  C.  B.  Tinker  of  Yale,  as  well  as  to  Messrs. 
E.  T.  Webb  and  W.  H.  Lowenhaupt  and  the 
printers,  for  numerous  criticisms  and  corrections 
upon  the  MS. 

J.  E.  M. 

New  Haven,  Conn. 
February  I,  19 17. 


TABLE  OF  CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Foreword         ix 

Chapter  I.          The  Reputation  of  James  Thomson  1 

Chapter  II.        Youth   and    Matilda    (1834-1853)  8 

Chapter  III.      Study  and  Teaching  (1853-1862)  25 

Chapter  IV.       Hackwork  in  London  (1862-1870)  59 

Chapter  V.         Travels    and    "The    City"    (1870- 

1874) 77 

Chapter  VI.      The  "Seven  Songless  Years"  (1874- 

1881) 97 

Chapter  VII.     Last  Days  (1881-1882)      .      .      .  114 

Chapter  VIII.  Criticism 136 


Note:— The  frontispiece  portrait  of  James  Thomson  is  after  an  etching 
made  by  A.  Evershed  in  1889,  which  appears  in  Dobell's  edition  of 
The  Poetical  Works,  London,  1895. 


CHAPTER  I 

THE  REPUTATION  OF  JAMES 
THOMSON 

TAMES  THOMSON  died  in  1882,  after  a 
**  life  which  he  himself  had  characterized  as 
"a  long  defeat."  In  many  details  his  sorrowful 
career  resembles  that  of  our  American  poet,  Poe. 
Both  poets  were  orphaned  children,  and  later 
endured  the  drudgery  of  an  uncongenial  profes- 
sion. Both  survived  the  woman  whom  they 
loved,  and  finding  that  her  image  persisted  in 
their  thoughts,  preserved  her  in  their  poems. 
Both  underwent  the  privations  and  poverty  of  an 
apparently  unsuccessful  literary  life,  at  length 
resorted  to  stimulants  as  a  desperate  escape  from 
their  memory,  and  finally  found  death  in  a  strange 
hospital,  apart  from  all  their  friends.  Yet  Poe 
had  not  long  to  wait  for  even  a  Continental  repu- 
tation, while  James  Thomson  is  still  a  misunder- 
stood and  half-forgotten  poet.  Whatever  Thom- 
son's virtues  are  as  a  poet,  and  they  grow  more 
and  more  impressive  on  study,  his  failure  to  gain 
popularity  is  hardly  without  the  malice  of  fate. 
For  over  twenty  years,  his  poems  appeared  in  the 
minor  English  magazines,   such   as   the   London 

[  1  ] 


LJJE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

Investigator,  the  National  Reformer,  Tail's 
Magazine  or  Cope's  Tobacco  Plant,  and  always 
under  the  pen-name  of  "B.  V."  Although  his 
poetry  brought  him  the  friendship  of  George 
Meredith,  P.  B.  Marston,  the  Rossettis,  Froude, 
Kingsley,  Saintsbury,  and  even  George  Eliot,  yet 
the  public  was  almost  unaware  of  his  existence. 
No  attempt  was  made  to  collect  any  of  his  poems 
until  1880,  when  Bertram  Dobell  published  "The 
City  of  Dreadful  Night,  and  Other  Poems." 
Encouraged  by  the  sale  of  this  book,  which 
reached  its  second  edition  in  1888  and  its  first 
American  edition  in  1892,  Dobell  published 
another  volume,  "Vane's  Story  and  Other 
Poems,"  in  1881,  without,  however,  the  success 
of  his  first  venture.  In  the  same  year  an  attempt 
by  Dobell  to  popularize  Thomson's  best  prose  by 
a  collection  entitled,  "Essays  and  Phantasies," 
was  rewarded  by  popular  apathy  and  critical  hos- 
tility. Thomson's  stylistic  faults  were  coldly  con- 
doned, his  virtues  as  a  poet  were  attacked,  and 
his  work  was  again  mostly  misunderstood  by  the 
reviewers.  In  1882  the  poet  died,  profoundly 
discouraged. 

Fate  has  proved  as  unkind  to  Thomson's  ad- 
mirers as  it  had  to  the  poet  himself.  Dobell's 
first  posthumous  collection  of  Thomson's  poems, 
"A  Voice  from  the  Nile,  and  Other  Poems,"  of 
1884,  resulted  in  another  failure.  A  biography 
of  Thomson  by  Henry  S.  Salt,  published  in  1889, 

[  2  ] 


THE  REPUTATION  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

was,  despite  William  Shairp's  loyal  puff  in  the 
Academy,  roundly  abused  by  the  magazine  critics, 
and  was  in  large  part  destroyed  by  a  fire  which 
also  consumed  almost  all  of  Thomson's  works 
previously  unsold.  A  copy  of  the  prose  collec- 
tion was  saved,  however,  for  the  Saturday  Review 
to  comment  upon  in  the  following  terms:  "Had 
Thomson  written  in  better  papers  and  under  more 
competent  editorship,  he  would  no  doubt  have 
learned  to  write  prose  better."  Undeterred  by 
these  constant  reverses,  Dobell,  in  1895,  edited 
Thomson's  Complete  Poetical  Works  in  two  vol- 
umes, and  in  the  following  year  published  the  first 
volume  of  his  collected  Critical  Prose,  intending 
three  other  volumes  to  follow  it.  The  Poems 
attained  a  certain  temporary  success,  but  the  first 
prose  volume  was  so  badly  received  that  the  three 
concluding  volumes  of  the  projected  series  were 
never  attempted.  Shortly  afterwards,  Reeves 
and  Turner,  who  had  published  these  various 
unsuccessful  ventures  for  Dobell,  went  out  of  busi- 
ness. In  the  fall  of  19 14  Dobell  himself  died. 
Since  his  death,  Thomson's  fame  has  suffered  a 
steady  decline,  broken  only  by  the  temporary  and 
slight  revivals  of  interest  which  attended  a  few 
other  rare  posthumous  publications  from  his 
works.  Mr.  Salt's  biography,  owing  alike  to  the 
coldness  of  the  public  and  the  fire  at  the  printer's, 
is  now  a  comparatively  rare  book.  Thomson  the 
poet  would  almost   seem  to   have   attained  that 

[  3  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

oblivion  for  which,  as  a  man,  he  had  so  wistfully 
prayed. 

This  decline  of  Thomson's  fame  is  commonly 
attributed  not  so  much  to  the  artistic  shortcomings 
of  the  poet,  as  to  the  "unrelieved  gloom"  of  his 
poetry.  That  this  gloom  is  not  all  unrelieved,  and 
that  at  its  worst  it  is  not  an  ignoble  sort  of  pessi- 
mism, it  is  the  purpose  of  the  present  volume 
later  to  demonstrate.  Meanwhile  the  reader 
must  admit  that  pessimism,  "that  strange  disease 
of  modern  life,"  largely  characterized  most  of  the 
poets  of  the  latter  half  of  the  last  century. 
Browning's  intense  cheerfulness  did  not  blind  his 
eyes  to  such  characters  as  Guido  Caponsacchi. 
Tennyson  was  able  to  attain  his  grave  moral 
happiness  in  life  only  after  a  great  struggle,  while 
Meredith  saved  himself  from  despair  only  by  his 
strong  will  and  his  austere  philosophy.  Neither 
did  the  Pre-Raphaelites  entirely  escape  into  their 
art.  Dante  Rossetti  walked  in  Willowwood 
almost  all  his  life,  Morris  confessed  his  inability 
to  "make  quick-coming  death  a  little  thing,"  while 
Swinburne's  prayer  for  absolute  annihilation  in 
the  "Garden  of  Proserpine"  was  quite  typical  of 
his  usual  outlook  on  life.  Arnold  and  Clough 
were  openly  and  profoundly  despondent. 

Thomson  is  the  most  pessimistic  of  all  these 
poets.  Even  Swinburne  rarely  touched  such 
depths  of  despair  as  Thomson  had  explored  in 
the  City  of  Dreadful  Night: 

[  4  ] 


THE  REPUTATION  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

"Take  a  watch,  erase 
The  signs  and  figures  of  the  circling  hours, 

Detach  the  hands,  remove  the  dial-face; 
The  works  proceed  until  run  down,  although 
Bereft  of  purpose,  void  of  use,  still  go." 

Swinburne's  popularity  has  without  doubt  been 
greatly  injured  by  the  despairing  gloom  of  the 
Poems  and  Ballads.  It  is,  therefore,  little  won- 
der that  James  Thomson,  the  extreme  pessimist 
of  all  these  poets,  should  suffer  at  the  hands  of 
the  public  for  his  dark  philosophy. 

Paradoxically  enough,  Thomson  is  by  turns  one 
of  the  cheerfullest  of  all  his  poetic  contempora- 
ries. In  many  almost  forgotten  poems  he  is 
delightfully  rapturous,  and  in  a  manner  quite 
natural  to  his  genius  and  temperament.  Of  his 
life-long  struggle  between  the  deepest  gloom  and 
this  rich  lyric  delight  in  life,  there  is  hardly  any 
realization  in  the  popular  mind.  Thomson's  J 
pessimism  is  not,  therefore,  the  only  reason  for 
his  unpopularity.  Neither  is  he  an  especially 
faulty  artist,  for  he  was  admired  by  some  of  the 
keenest  writers  and  critics  of  his  day.  The  truth 
is  that  Thomson  was  a  radical  in  his  life  and  his 
connections.  A  Bohemian  in  the  very  respectable 
Mid-Victorian  period,  he  was  entirely  the  antithe- 
sis of  Tennyson,  the  great  popular  poet  of  the 
time.  While  he  admired  Tennyson's  consum- 
mate    art,     Thomson    despised    his    matter     as 

[  5  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

"hysterics  and  commonplace  philosophy."  He 
was  utterly  different  from  Longfellow,  then  the 
poetical  demi-god  of  the  middle  classes,  nor  did 
he  cloak  his  feelings  toward  the  author  of  Evan- 
geline in  uncertain  terms.  "The  sublime  Ex- 
celsior," he  once  declared,  explosively  enough,  "is 
very  popular  at  present,  but  I  doubt  whether  any 
man  (soft  curates,  Sunday  school  teachers  and 
tea  meeting  muffs  who  think  beer  and  tobacco 
certain  perdition,  excepted)  ever  read  the  adven- 
tures of  its  lofty  hero  without  ejaculating,  'The 
ineffable  ass!     The  infernal  idiot!'" 

Such  a  writer,  either  as  poet  or  as  critic,  was 
obviously  not  likely  to  enjoy  too  clamorous  a  pub- 
lic in  those  cautious  and  conservative  days.  More- 
over, some  of  the  "tea  meeting  muffs"  struck  back 
at  Thomson  in  reviews  and  magazine  articles. 
They  declared  that  Thomson's  failure  in  life  was 
due  to  his  cavalier  manner  in  abandoning  the 
teaching  profession,  and  his  willful  refusal  of 
"remunerative  journalistic  work  on  two  great 
daily  newspapers,"  with  a  comfortable  salary  and 
much  leisure.  Great  stress  has  been  laid  by  some 
of  these  "Sunday  school  teachers"  on  the  poet's 
indulgence  in  the  "artificial  paradises  induced  by 
alcohol  and  drugs."  They  have  charged  Thom- 
son with  an  inability  to  perform  regular  allotted 
tasks,  and  with  a  perverse  insistence  in  working 
at  literary  jobs  after  his  own  heart.  One  re- 
viewer  of  Thomson's   second   volume   has   even 

[  6  ] 


THE  REPUTATION  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

declared  that  the  poet's  pessimism  in  the  City  of 
Dreadful  Night  is  purely  an  artifice — a  literary 
trick!  From  the  misunderstanding  and  neglect 
which  he  suffered  at  the  hands  of  such  contempo- 
rary critics  as  these,  Thomson  has  never  gained 
the  popularity  he  deserves. 

Thomson's  poetry,  as  well  as  much  of  his  prose, 
is  inseparably  connected  with  his  life.  He  is  one 
of  the  most  personal  of  poets.  While  he  was 
extremely  reticent  about  discussing  himself  and 
his  affairs,  he  put  them  nakedly  and  truthfully 
into  his  poems.  His  life  was  an  incessant  strug- 
gle with  pessimism,  and  both  his  poems  and  his 
character  must  therefore  be  interpreted  in  terms 
of  this  struggle.  Fortunately  he  dated  all  his 
poems  and  most  of  his  prose  with  his  own  hand, 
and  it  is  therefore  not  a  difficult  task  to  trace  the 
progress  of  his  actual  and  his  spiritual  life  by 
studying  his  works  in  the  order  of  their  sequence. 
Although  both  Mr.  Dobell  and  Mr.  Salt, 
Thomson's  two  chief  biographers,  have  suggested 
this  method  for  investigating  the  poet's  works, 
neither  of  them,  curiously  enough,  has  made  any 
attempt  at  such  a  study.  It  is  the  purpose  of  the 
present  essay  to  sketch  the  poet's  life,  using  his 
poems  and  his  prose  chronologically  as  a  key  to  J 
his  inner  development. 


[7  ] 


CHAPTER  II 
YOUTH  AND  MATILDA   (1834-1853) 

TAMES  THOMSON  was  born  in  Port-Glas- 
*-*  gow  on  the  twenty-third  of  November,  1834, 
of  Scotch  parents.  The  poet's  double  and  contra- 
dictory nature  came  largely  from  his  parents,  who 
were  utterly  different  from  each  other.  His  father 
was  a  captain  in  the  merchant  service,  cheerful, 
bright,  a  clever  mechanic  and  a  good  companion, 
who  was  especially  fond  of  reading,  reciting  and 
singing.  His  mother,  Sarah  Kennedy,  was  deeply 
religious,  strongly  imaginative,  and  of  a  pensive, 
melancholy  disposition.  From  the  former  the 
poet  inherited  that  bonhomie  and  cheerful 
sociability  which  distinguished  him  all  his  life. 
From  the  latter  he  inherited  his  brooding  imagi- 
nation, his  gloom  and  his  emotional  tempera- 
ment. Owing  to  his  mother,  James  was  reared  in 
a  severely  religious  household.  Edward  Irving's 
portrait,  covered  with  yellow  gauze,  hung  in  the 
parlor.  The  poet  himself  was  as  a  little  boy  com- 
pelled to  memorize  the  Assembly's  Shorter  Cate- 
chism, and  was  strictly  dieted  upon  hymns  and 
tracts  popular  with  the  Irvingites.     So  scrupulous 

[  8  ] 


YOUTH  AND  MATILDA 

was  this  early  religious  training  that  its  influence 
clung  to  James  all  his  days.  His  later  blasphe- 
mies and  slashes  at  orthodoxy  are  only  the  utter- 
ances of  a  deeply  religious  nature  whose  grim 
creed  has  completely  failed  him. 

The  poet's  early  childhood  was  not  a  happy 
one.  He  was  barely  able  to  remember  the  death 
of  his  younger  and  only  sister.  But  in  1840  his 
father,  while  on  a  distant  voyage,  was  paralyzed 
and  rendered  helpless  mentally  and  physically 
until  his  death  in  1853.  Whether  this  stroke  was 
the  result  of  intemperance,  of  which  the  poet  him- 
self was  later  a  victim  and  which,  by  his  own 
admission,  had  run  in  his  family,  has  been  the 
subject  of  much  fruitless  discussion.  The  acci- 
dent at  once  threw  the  family  into  financial  dis- 
tress, and  in  1842  they  appear  at  various  ad- 
dresses in  East  London,  whither  they  had  drifted. 
Thus  the  poet  in  his  boyhood  came  to  know  the 
ugliness  and  murky  atmosphere  of  the  metropolis 
which  he  was  destined  later  to  describe  in  the 
City  of  Dreadful  Night: 

"The  street  lamps  burn  amidst  the  baleful 
glooms, 
Amidst  the  soundless  solitudes  immense 
Of  ranged  mansions  dark  and  still  as  tombs. 
The  silence  which  benumbs  and  strains 
the  sense 

[  9  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

Fulfills  with  awe  the  soul's  despair  unweep- 

ing: 
Myriads  of  habitants  are  ever  sleeping, 
Or  dead,  or  fled  from  nameless  pestilence!" 

Although  his  later  boyhood  and  early  manhood 
were  for  the  most  part  spent  in  the  country,  never- 
theless these  grim,  childish  impressions  of  Lon- 
don never  left  him.  His  mother  died  in  1843, 
leaving  him  to  the  care  of  his  father,  whose  mind 
wavered  between  fits  of  passionate  anger  or  reli- 
gious gloom,  and  the  torpor  of  senility.  Thom- 
son, although  usually  very  reticent  about  family 
matters,  once  wrote  the  following  impressions  of 
his  childhood: 

"I  was  just  past  eight  years  old  and  at 
the  school  when  mother  died,  so  I  can  only 
give  you  very  early  impressions.  These  are, 
that  father  and  mother  were  very  happy 
together  when  he  was  at  home,  until,  when  I 
was  about  six,  he  returned  from  his  last 
voyage  paralyzed  in  the  right  side,  the  re- 
sult, as  I  understand,  of  a  week  of  terrible 
storm  during  which  time  he  was  never  able 
to  change  his  drenched  clothes.  Before  then 
I  think  he  was  a  good  husband  and  a  kind 
father:  her  I  always  remember  as  a  loving 
mother  and  wife.  He  may  have  been  gay,  in 
the  sense  of  liking  a  social  song  and  glass, 
being,    I   believe,   much   better   looking   and 

[  10  ] 


YOUTH  AND  MATILDA 

more  attractive  in  company  than  either  of 
his  sons.  She  was  more  serious,  and  pious 
too,  following  Irving  from  the  Kirk  when  he 
was  driven  out.  I  remember  well  Irving's 
portrait  under  yellow  gauze,  and  some  books 
of  his  on  the  interpretation  of  prophecy, 
which  I  used  to  read  for  the  imagery.  The 
paralysis  at  first  unhinged  father's  mind, 
and  he  had  some  fits  of  violence;  more  gen- 
erally his  temper  was  strange,  disagreeable, 
not  to  be  depended  upon.  I  remember  him 
taunting  her  with  being  his  elder.  Mother 
must  have  had  a  sad  time  of  it  for  a  year  or 
two.  His  mental  perturbations  settled  down 
into  a  permanent  weakness  of  mind,  not 
amounting  to  imbecility,  but  very,  very  dif- 
ferent, I  should  say,  from  his  former  bright- 
ness and  decision.  Before  I  went  to  the 
school  he  used  to  take  me  to  chapels  where 
the  members  of  the  congregation  ejaculated 
groaning  responses  to  the  minister's  prayer, 
and  to  small  meetings  in  a  private  room 
where  the  members  detailed  their  spiritual 
experiences  for  the  week.  Good,  bad,  or 
indifferent,  those  were  not  the  things  with 
which  he  had  anything  to  do  in  his  days  of 
soundness.  The  right  hand  remained  use- 
less, but  the  leg  had  gradually  grown  strong 
enough  to  walk  well,  though  with  an  awk- 
ward, dragging  pace. 

[  11  1 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

"I  think  mother,  who  was  mystically  in- 
clined with  Edward  Irving,  had  also  a  cloud 
of  melancholy  overhanging  her;  first,  per- 
haps, from  the  death  of  her  favorite  brother, 
John  Parker  Kennedy,  drowned  on  the 
Goodwin  Sands;  then  probably  deepened  by 
the  death  of  my  little  sister,  of  whom  I  re- 
member being  devotedly  fond,  when  she  was 
about  three  and  myself  five,  of  the  measles 
caught  from  me.  Had  she  or  someone  else 
lived,  I  might  have  been  worth  something; 
but,  on  the  whole,  I  sincerely  judge  that  it 
was  well  for  both  to  die  when  they  did,  and 
I  would  not,  for  my  own  selfish  comfort, 
call  them  back  if  I  could.  .  .  .  Speaking  gen- 
erally, you  know  far  more  of  my  family  than 
I  do,  who  have  been  Ishmael  in  the  desert 
from  my  childhood." 

Fortunately,  James  was  not  entirely  depend- 
ent upon  his  father's  care.  Shortly  before  his 
mother's  death,  he  entered  the  Royal  Caledonian 
Asylum  in  London,  his  election  there  having  been 
procured  by  a  Mr.  J.  Boyd,  a  former  townsman 
of  his  mother's.  His  career  at  this  school,  the 
happiest  period  of  his  life,  seems  to  have  been 
very  successful.  By  his  classmates  he  was  remem- 
bered as  "a  fine,  clever,  high-spirited  boy,"  a 
leader  in  study  and  play.  He  impressed  his 
masters  with  his  huge  love  of  reading,  and  a  de- 

[  12  ] 


YOUTH  AND  MATILDA 

cided  ability  in  mathematics.  He  early  displayed 
his  life-long  love  for  music,  which  had  been 
inherited  from  and  developed  by  his  father,  for 
it  is  recorded  that  he  played  first  clarionet  in  the 
school  band. 

In  1850  he  found  himself  at  the  parting  of  the 
ways  as  to  his  future  career.  Lacking  the  money 
to  gain  a  clerkship  in  business,  which  had  been 
his  original  wish,  he  decided  to  fit  himself  for  an 
army  schoolmaster,  and  accordingly  left  the  Royal 
Caledonian  Asylum  for  the  "Model  School"  in 
the  Royal  Military  Asylum  in  Chelsea.  Here 
also  he  became  popular  at  once  with  his  fellows, 
and  displayed  great  ability  as  a  student,  owing 
alike  to  his  powerful  memory  and  to  a  natural 
aptitude  for  mathematics,  an  inheritance  perhaps 
from  his  father,  who  in  his  time  had  been  a  clever 
mechanic.  Even  now  the  poet  showed  that 
breadth  of  literary  taste,  which  was  later  to  dis- 
tinguish many  critical  essays  still  uncollected.  His 
literary  tastes  developed  early,  as  indeed  did  his 
whole  mind.  He  read  Shakespeare,  Ben  Jonson, 
Spenser,  Milton,  Fielding,  Sterne,  Smollett  and 
De  Foe.  Swift  and  De  Quincey,  the  strongest 
influences  on  his  later  prose,  were  already  his 
favorite  prose  authors,  while  he  now  foreswore 
his  worship  of  Byron,  the  idol  of  his  youthful 
poetic  enthusiasm,  for  Shelley,  whose  influence 
lasted  all  through  his  life. 

During  his  holidays,  Thomson  used  to  visit  the 

[  13  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

Grays,  old  acquaintances  of  his  father's,  and  came 
to  be  a  great  friend  of  the  two  daughters,  Helen 
and  Agnes.  The  latter  has  written  her  impres- 
sions of  Thomson  at  this  period  in  his  life : 

"We  always  thought  him  wonderfully 
clever,  very  nice-looking,  and  very  gentle, 
grave  and  kind.  .  .  .  My  eldest  sister 
(Helen)  was  his  especial  favorite.  Her 
will  always  seemed  law  to  him.  She  was 
gay  as  he  was  grave,  but  whatever  Helen 
said  or  did  won  appreciation  from  him.  .  .  . 
Previous  to  going  (to  Ireland)  he  earnestly 
requested  that  my  sister  might  be  allowed 
to  correspond  with  him,  a  request  which  my 
parents  thought  it  wise  to  refuse." 

Thomson  proved  to  be  a  methodical,  industrious 
student,  and  mastered  several  languages  entirely 
by  his  own  exertions.  The  breadth  and  acuteness 
of  his  literary  tastes  are  shown  by  the  fact  that  in 
1850  he  was  already  reading  Browning  and  Mere- 
dith, who  at  that  time  were  being  quite  neglected 
by  the  public.  A  most  promising  career  seemed 
in  store  for  him. 

In  the  summer  of  1851  Thomson  left  the  Mili- 
tary Asylum  at  Chelsea  in  order  to  learn  the  prac- 
tical duties  of  the  army  schoolmaster,  for  which 
he  had  been  fitting  himself.  He  was  sent  to  Bal- 
Jincollig,  near  Cork,  as  assistant  to  the  garrison 
master,  a  Mr.  Joseph  Barnes.     For  the  next  two 

[  14  ] 


YOUTH  AND  MATILDA 

years  he  taught  there  in  the  regimental  school. 
He  was  considered  by  his  master  a  brilliant  and 
accomplished  assistant,  and,  in  spite  of  his  seven- 
teen years,  showed  himself  entirely  qualified  to 
teach.  Barnes  was  a  self-educated  and  kindly  man. 
Both  he  and  his  wife  became  warm  friends  of 
Thomson,  and  did  everything  in  their  power  to 
make  his  life  at  Ballincollig  pleasant  and  enjoy- 
able. For  the  first  time  in  his  life  Thomson  lived 
within  the  intimacy  of  a  normal  and  affectionate 
family.  In  a  series  of  six  sonnets  written  in  1862, 
Thomson  commemorates  his  sincere  affection  for 
the  Barneses.  Yet  it  was  here  that  he  was  des- 
tined to  experience  the  supreme  delight  and  the 
supreme  tragedy  of  his  life — a  tragedy  with  con- 
sequences so  great  that  his  promising  abilities 
came  to  nothing  but  a  few  of  the  saddest  and 
most  terrible  poetic  masterpieces  to  which  our 
literature  can  lay  claim. 

Matilda  Weller  was  the  beautiful  daughter  of 
an  armorer-sergeant  then  stationed  at  Ballincol- 
lig. Years  afterwards,  in  his  fantastic  Vane's 
Story,  Thomson  described  her: 

"For  thought  retraced  the  long,  sad  years 
Of  pallid  smiles  and  frozen  tears 
Back  to  a  certain  festal  night, 
A  whirl  and  blaze  of  swift  delight 
When  we  together  danced,  we  two; 
I  live  it  all  again — Do  you 

[  15  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

Remember  how  I  broke  down  quite 

In  the  mere  polka?  .   .   .  Dressed  in  white, 

A  loose  pink  sash  around  your  waist, 

Low  shoes  across  the  instep  laced, 

Your  moon-white  shoulders  glancing  through 

Long  yellow  ringlets  dancing  too, 

You  were  an  angel  then;  as  clean 

From  earthly  dust-speck,  as  serene 

And  lovely  and  above  my  love 

As  now  in  your  far  world  above." 

This  is  Thomson's  usual  description  of  Ma- 
tilda— young  and  pure,  dressed  in  white  and  pink, 
with  yellow  ringlets.  Mr.  Salt  states  that  he 
verified  this  description  through  a  daguerreotype 
which  in  1889  was  in  the  possession  of  William 
Weller,  a  relative. 

When  the  poet  first  met  Matilda  at  the  Barnes', 
she  was  barely  fourteen,  and  he  himself  only 
eighteen.  Yet  Thomson's  passion  for  her  was  not 
a  superficial  one,  as  two  terrible  cantos  of  the 
City  of  Dreadful  Night,  written  over  twenty  years 
afterwards,  will  attest.  Thomson,  like  many 
other  poets  who  have  loved  young,  was  noted  for 
his  precocity,  and  in  fact  bore  the  pet  name  "Co" 
in  the  Barnes  household.  Unusual  as  such  a 
youthful  attachment  is,  there  is  no  reason  whatso- 
ever to  consider  it  as  a  mere  literary  motif  for  his 
later  years.  In  the  Fadeless  Bower,  written  in 
1858,    a    half-forgotten    poem    whose    lulls    are 

[  16  ] 


YOUTH  AND  MATILDA 

reminiscent  of  the  rich,  sensuous  details  and  liquid 
undertones  of  Rossetti,  but  whose  more  fervid 
stanzas  have  a  powerful  sincerity  which  the  Pre- 
Raphaelites  rarely  possessed,  Thomson  has  de- 
scribed his  love-plight  with  his  "Good  Angel"  : 

"Behold  her  as  she  standeth  there, 

Breathless,    with     fixed,     awe-shadowed 
eyes 
Beneath  her  moon-touched  golden  hair! 

Her  spirit's  poor  humilities 
Are  trembling,  half  would  disavow 
The  crown  I  bring  to  crown  her  brow. 

"The  simplest  folds  of  white  invest 
Her  noble  form,  as  purest  snow 
Some  far  and  lovely  mountain-crest 

Faint-flushed   with    all   the    dawn's    first 
glow, 
Alone,  resplendent,  lifted  high 
Into  the  clear,  vast,  breathless  sky. 

"Could  that  one  hour  have  been  drawn  out 
Until  the  end  of  Time's  whole  range! 
We  rapt  away,  so  sphered  about, 

And  made  eternal,  free  from  change; 
In  heart  and  mind,  in  soul  and  frame 
Preserved  for  evermore  the  same ! 


[  17  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

"Entranced  above  the  worded  Yes 

All    flushed    and    pale    with    rapturous 
shame, 
In  that  dim  moonlit  quietness 

You  stand  for  evermore  the  same, 
Fairer  than  heaven,  the  Queen  who  now 
Is  trembling  as  I  crown  her  brow." 

It  is  not  actually  known  whether  the  two  young 
lovers  became  formally  engaged,  for  Thomson 
never  alluded  to  the  affair  afterward,  except  in  his 
poems.  Apart  from  the  evidence  in  the  last 
stanza  quoted  above,  both  Mr.  Dobell  and  Mr. 
Salt  express  no  doubts  that  Thomson's  suit  was 
approved  by  the  girl's  parents,  as  the  poet  seemed 
a  most  clever  and  promising  young  man  to  every- 
one at  that  time.  His  love  for  Matilda  was  cer- 
tainly well  known  to  the  Barnes  family,  and  his 
engagement  to  her  was  apparently  accepted  by 
them  as  an  obvious  fact.  For  a  little  time,  at 
least,  there  was  nothing  to  cloud  their  happiness, 
and  the  poet's  almost  life-long  melancholia  seems 
to  have  been  lifted  from  his  mind. 

Thomson  remained  in  Ballincollig  for  the 
greater  part  of  two  years  to  gain  practice  in 
teaching,  after  which  he  returned  to  Chelsea. 
This  step  marked  the  beginning  of  a  series  of 
final  studies  before  Thomson  became  a  full- 
fledged  schoolmaster.  This  routine  was  scarcely 
necessary  in  his  case,  as  he  was  already  well  quali- 

[  18  ] 


YOUTH  AND  MATILDA 

fied,  and  it  seems  to  have  irked  him  much.  In 
Love's  Dawn,  his  only  poem  written  in  1852,  we 
find  the  young  poet  dreaming  of  his  mistress 
across  the  Irish  Sea,  in  a  highly  personal  and 
significant  manner,  although  somewhat  in  the 
style  of  Browning's  Pauline: 

"Still  thine  eyes  haunt  me;  in  the  darkness 

now, 
The  dreamtime,  the  hushed  stillness  of  the 

night 
I  see  them  shining,  pure  and  earnest  light; 
And  here,  all  lonely,  may  I  not  avow 
The   thrill   with   which   I   ever   meet  their 

glance  ? 
At  first  they  gazed  a  calm,  abstracted  gaze, 
The  while   thy  soul  was   floating  through 

some  maze 
Of  beautiful  divinely-peopled  trance; 
But  now  I  shrink  from  them  in  shame  and 

fear, 
For  they  are  gathering  all  their  beams  of 

light 
Into  an  arrow,  keen,  intense,  and  bright, 
Swerveless  and  starlike  from  its  deep  blue 

sphere, 
Piercing  the  cavernous  darkness  of  my  soul, 
Burning  its  foul  recesses  into  view; 
Transfixing  with  sharp  agony  through  and 

through 

[  19  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

Whatever  is  not  brave  and  clean  and  whole. 
And  yet  I  will  not  shrink,   although  thou 

piercest 
Into  the  inmost  depths  of  all  my  being: 
I  will  not  shrink,   although  thou  art  now 

seeing 
My  heart's  caged  lusts,  the  wildest  and  the 

fiercest; 
The  cynic  thoughts  that  fret  my  homeless 

mind, 
My  unbelief,  my  selfishness,  my  weakness, 
My  dismal  lack  of  charity  and  meekness; 
For,  amidst  all  the  evil,  thou  wilt  find 
Pervading,  cleansing  and  transmuting  me, 
A  fervent  and  most  holy  love  for  Thee." 

During  this  separation  from  Matilda,  almost 
all  that  was  fairest  and  noblest  in  life  became  in 
Thomson's  mind  indissolubly  linked  with  her  ever 
present  image.  To  him,  with  his  constant  ten- 
dency toward  allegory,  she  grew  to  be  an  almost 
sacred  symbol.  His  prospects  during  this  second 
stay  at  Chelsea  were  very  bright.  He  had 
acquired  no  little  knowledge  of  books,  and  had 
seen  something  of  men  and  the  world.  He  had 
won  the  love  of  a  beautiful  girl,  and  had  suc- 
ceeded brilliantly  at  Ballincollig  as  an  assistant. 
Thus  far  he  had  shown  himself  unusually  capable, 
and  was  well  liked  by  all  his  acquaintances.  For 
the  first  time  in  his  life  he  seemed  on  the  point  of 

[  20  ] 


YOUTH  AND  MATILDA 

earning  a  competent  living.  Perhaps  had  the  tre- 
mendous inspiration  of  her  presence  been  always 
his,  Thomson  would  never  have  paced  the  ghostly 
streets  in  that  "most  dolent  city."  Perhaps  his 
melancholia  would  have  lifted  and  been  dispersed, 
like  the  wisps  of  fog  under  the  radiance  of  the 
sunshine.  So  at  least  the  poet  himself  thought 
in  the  Fadeless  Bower,  and  in  many  other  pathetic 
poems  of  his  later  life.  Yet  the  price  of  great 
poetry  is  human  pain,  and  this  happiness  was  not 
destined  for  him.  Already  had  "Melancholy 
marked  him  for  her  own." 

Matilda  died  in  the  early  summer  of  1853, 
when  the  poet  had  almost  finished  his  studies  at 
Chelsea.  It  has  been  conjectured  from  his  prose 
masterpiece,  A  Lady  of  Sorrow,  that  the  poet 
knew  her  to  be  in  frail  health,  and  had  perhaps 
a  natural  apprehension  for  her  death,  which  Fate 
converted  into  a  seeming  prophecy: 

"One  whom  I  scarcely  know  whether  to 
call  friend  or  enemy;  she  who  came  suddenly 
(though  indeed  her  advent  had  been  long  be- 
fore announced)  in  the  brilliant  morning  of 
a  joyous  summer  holiday  to  dwell  with  me 
and  possess  me;  permitting  no  rivals  nor  any 
approach  to  rivalry,  absorbing  every  thought 
and  feeling  to  her  devotion,  and  compelling 
even  the  dreams  and  visions  of  both  night 
and  day  to  worship  her." 

[  21  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

Whether  anticipated  or  not,  however,  he  re- 
ceived a  letter  one  morning  telling  of  her  dan- 
gerous illness,  and  the  next  day  the  news  of  her 
death  came  to  him.  The  death  of  Matilda  was  to 
prove  the  most  momentous  event  in  his  whole  life. 
It  is  beside  the  point  to  conjecture  whether  this 
bereavement  was  the  actual  cause  of  his  later 
life-long  sorrow,  or  whether  it  was  merely  a 
supreme  incident  to  which  his  inevitable  melan- 
choly attached  itself.  The  shock  of  her  death 
the  poet  has  again  and  again  recorded,  sometimes 
with  pathos,  as  in  the  Fadeless  Bower,  and  some- 
times wTith  grim  tragedy,  as  in  the  City.  In  the 
Lady  of  Sorrow  he  wrote : 

"I  speak  not  of  her,  I  cannot  speak  of  her, 
as  she  came  at  first;  when  my  spirit  was 
stunned  and  lay  as  dead  in  the  body  mechani- 
cally alive ;  lay  in  swoon  with  but  the  dim- 
mest consciousness  of  her  presence,  sitting 
down  black-veiled  beside  me  many  nights  and 
days,  speaking  not  a  word,  as  the  friends  of 
Job  sat  silent  at  first,  for  they  saw  that  his 
grief  was  very  great." 

He  never  forgot  her.  The  very  year  he  died, 
Thomson  was  writing  of  her  still.  While  the 
other  interests  of  his  life,  his  career,  his  religion, 
his  health,  and  even  his  art,  all  slowly  withered 
away,   her  image   remained   always   radiant   and 

[  22  ] 


YOUTH  AND  MATILDA 

always  poignant  with  the  beauty  of  the  days  that 
are  no  more.  In  his  happier  moments  he  could 
wistfully  dream  of  what  might  have  been,  and  in 
a  pathetic  mockery  live  out  for  some  brief  hours 
a  shadowy  life  of  love. 

"For  she  was  simply  the  image  in  beati- 
tude of  her  who  died  so  young.  The  pure 
girl  was  become  an  angel;  the  sheathed  wings 
had  unfolded  in  the  favorable  clime,  the  ves- 
ture was  radiantly  white  with  the  whiteness 
of  her  soul,  the  long  hair  was  a  dazzling 
glory  around  the  ever-young  head,  the  blue 
eyes  had  absorbed  celestial  light  in  the  cloud- 
less empyrean :  but  still,  thus  developed  and 
beautiful,  she  was  only  the  more  intensely 
and  supremely  herself;  more  perfectly  re- 
vealed to  me,  more  intimately  known  and 
more  passionately  loved  by  me,  than  when 
she  had  walked  the  earth  in  the  guise  of  a 
mortal.  She  would  take  me  by  the  hand, 
sometimes  impressing  a  kiss,  which  was  an 
ample  anodyne,  upon  my  world-weary  brow, 
and  lead  me  away  floating  calmly  through 
the  infinite  height  and  depth  and  breadth; 
from  galaxy  to  galaxy,  from  silver  star  to 
star." 

The  inevitable  comparison  of  the  above  pas- 
sage to  Dante's  supreme  vision  of  Beatrice,  and 

[  23  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

"L'amor  chi  move  il  sol  e  l'altre  stelle,"  is  not 
merely  accidental,  for  in  many  aspects  both  the 
life  and  the  poems  of  Thomson  resemble  the 
immortal  Florentine's  more  closely  than  any  other 
English  poet.  But  on  the  other  hand,  while 
Thomson's  grimmer  moods  were  upon  him,  this 
memory  of  Matilda  could  embody  to  him  all  the 
supreme  loveliness  of  the  world,  which  in  life's 
tragic  pageant  was  doomed  by  the  "blind  gods 
who  cannot  spare."  Thus  we  find  her  wraith 
enduring  in  the  City  of  Dreadful  Night  and  the 
perfume  of  her  departed  presence  even  amid  the 
horror  of  In  the  Room.  None  of  the  biographers 
who  knew  the  poet,  and  no  reputable  critic  who 
knew  his  poems,  has  ever  seriously  questioned 
Thomson's  sincerity  in  this  tragic  afterglow  of  his 
love  for  Matilda  Weller.  Into  every  prose  and 
poetic  masterpiece  that  he  wrote,  this  memory  of 
her  love  is  subtly  but  unfailingly  woven.  With  her 
death,  he  too  began  a  "new  life." 


[  24  ] 


CHAPTER  III 
STUDY  AND  TEACHING  (1853-1862) 

A  FTER  the  initial  torpor  of  his  grief  for 
■**■  Matilda  had  subsided,  Thomson  went  about 
his  studies  outwardly  the  same.  During  1853  he 
wrote  nothing.  He  did  finish  his  studies  at  Chel- 
sea, however,  and  in  August,  1854,  about  the  time 
of  the  Crimean  War,  he  enlisted  as  army  school- 
master to  a  militia  regiment  in  Devonshire.  This 
was  but  the  first  of  many  posts  which  he  occupied 
during  the  next  eight  years.  He  was  frequently 
shifted,  and  taught  successively  at  Aldershot, 
Dublin,  Curragh  Camp,  again  at  Aldershot,  and 
at  Portsmouth.  In  those  days  a  schoolmaster  in 
the  English  army  was  considered  a  soldier  rather 
than  a  civilian.  Thomson  wore  the  uniforms  of 
the  respective  regiments  to  which  he  was  attached, 
and  was,  theoretically  at  least,  obliged  to  con- 
form to  the  usual  military  discipline.  He  taught 
children  in  the  morning  and  the  soldiers  in  the 
afternoon,  besides  additional  instruction  during 
the  evening  to  pupils  who  were  either  too  rapid 
or  too  slow  for  the  regular  classes.  On  the  whole, 
Thomson  proved  to  be  an  efficient  teacher,  owing 
to  his  keen,  clear  intellect  and  to  his  methodical, 

[  25  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

industrious  habits.  Yet  his  heart  was  not  in  the 
work.  Thomson  was  popular  with  his  associates 
and  with  the  soldiers,  without  being  intimate  with 
any  of  them.  Outwardly  he  was  cheerful  and 
genial,  in  an  occupation  which  he  described  to  a 
friend  as  "Pumping  muddy  information  into  un- 
retentive  sieves."  Inwardly,  and  during  those 
leisure  hours  when  he  most  truly  lived,  he  was 
passing  through  a  great  spiritual  struggle,  and  as 
an  artist  was  serving  his  apprenticeship  in  verse, 
of  which  he  wrote  much  during  these  years. 
Thomson's  Bohemian  ways  were  greatly  encour- 
aged by  this  rough,  shifting  life,  and  his  lack  of 
friends  threw  his  mind  back  upon  itself  and  its 
memories.  One  advantage,  at  least,  he  gained 
from  it — a  knowledge  of  nature  and  of  country 
life.  There  is  a  richness  of  color  and  a  sense  of 
beauty  in  these  poems  of  his  early  years  which  are 
more  rarely  found  after  he  had  returned  to  live 
in  London.  Yet  in  even  these  later  poems  there 
are  many  natural  touches  which  his  observing 
mind  had  garnered  while  he  was  in  Ireland  or  at 
Portsmouth. 

As  might  be  expected,  his  only  poem  in  1854 
was  a  lament  for  Matilda,  and  was  entitled, 
Marriage.  In  the  following  year  he  wrote  the 
Dreamer,  which  also  deals  with  the  poet's  dreams 
of  marriage  with  his  dead  lady,  and  the  reflec- 
tion (a  trifle  uncertain,  it  seems)  that  she  was  in 
a  better  world.    In  a  poem  Suggested  by  Matthew 

[  26  ] 


STUDY  AND  TEACHING 

Arnold's  "Stanzas  from  the  Grand  Chartreuse" 
he  laments  the  departure  of  the  old,  comforting 
faith,  and  disparages  the  arrogance  of  modern 
science,  the  sordidness  of  Mammon-worship,  and 
the  sentimental  worship  of  poverty  by  humani- 
tarii.  \s.  Most  significant,  however,  is  the  fact 
that  his  old  orthodoxy  is  now  shattered,  and  he 
finds  himself  groping  in  the  dark,  painfully  unable 
to  believe  the  old  creed,  to  which,  however,  he  is 
not  yet  hostile.  In  1856  he  wrote  his  Tasso  to 
Leonora,  in  which  the  poet  shows  his  apprehen- 
sion as  to  the  immortality  of  the  soul,  and  again 
reveals  the  scars  of  his  unhappy  love  affair. 

The  year  of  1857  was  his  first  great  productive 
year  in  poetry,  and  because  of  the  fact,  it  shows 
the  two  sides  of  the  poet's  nature;  one,  the  cheer- 
ful and  even  rapturous  good  fellow;  the  other,  the 
gloomy,  anxious  dreamer  whose  love  is  dead.  At 
times  Thomson  was  able  to  enter  into  the  rough 
army  life  about  him,  as  is  shown  by  several  army 
poems  published  this  year;  the  Capstan  Chorus, 
the  Jolly  Veterans,  and  the  Sergeant's  Mess  Song. 
In  their  occasional  touches  of  realistic  good  hu- 
mor, these  poems  remind  the  reader  oddly  of  the 
Barrack  Room  Ballads.  Yet  the  second  of  these 
poems  ends  in  a  fatalistic  spirit  which  reveals  the 
other  and  darker  side  of  Thomson's  tempera- 
ment. The  subject  of  Bertram  to  the  Lady 
Geraldine  was  no  doubt  suggested  by  Mrs. 
Browning's  more  famous  poem.     Here  we  see  his 

[  27  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

unforgotten  vision  of  love  struggling  with  fatal- 
ism, and  triumphing  over  it.  Again  he  recalls, 
as  later  in  Vane's  Story,  the  rapture  of  the  dance 
with  his  beloved: 

"Oh,  glory  of  the  dance  sublimed  to  this! 
Oh,    pure   white    arm   electric   that   em- 
braced 
Ethereal-lightly  my  unbounded  bliss! 
Oh,  let  me  die  but  in  another  taste 
Of  that  warm  breath  ambrosial,   and  the 
kiss 
Of    those    whirl-wanton    ringlets;    inter- 
laced 
Quick  frame  with  frame  borne  on;  my  lips 

the  while 
Within     a     neck-bend     of     that     heavenly 
smile!" 

This  is  not  the  description  of  the  Lady  Geral- 
dine — it  is  again  his  memory  of  Matilda,  ex- 
pressed with  the  uncertain  technique  of  a  young 
poet.  Here,  as  before  in  Tasso  to  Leonora,  the 
poet  seizes  upon  an  old  love  story  as  a  vehicle  for 
his  personal  experiences  and  moods.  At  the  end 
love  triumphs: 

"Be  pain  unnoticed  in  a  doom  like  this! 
I  see  eyes  gazing  on  my  weary  night 
Like  cold,  strange  stars  from  out  the  world- 
abyss  ; 

[  28  ] 


STUDY  AND  TEACHING 

They  gaze  with  scorn  or  pity;  but  their 
sight 
Is  banished  from  my  inward  golden  bliss, 

Floating  divinely  in  the  noonday  light 
Of  thee  round  whom  I  circle — O  far  Sun 
Through  mirk  and  slime  alike  the  earth's 
true  course  is  run!" 

Yet  the  triumph  of  his  love  is  something  of  a 
Pyrrhian  victory.  Against  the  bitter  fate  with 
which  he  struggles,  he  opposes  now  passionate 
idealism,  and  now  only  faltering  and  wistful 
rhetoric. 

In  the  Festival  of  Life,  written  the  next  month, 
Thomson's    imagination,    for   the    first   time    re- 
corded in  his  verse,  fully  took  fire.     The  poem  is 
an  allegorical  narrative  in  free  ode-stanzas,  after 
Shelley.    There  is  in  it  much  sweeping  lyric  power 
and  much  highly  imaginative  description.     Like 
some  of  the  allegories  of  Shelley,  too,  it  is  rather 
difficult  to  interpret.    It  seems  to  be  an  allegorical 
restatement   of   the    poet's   spiritual   experiences, 
in  which  his  artistic  nature  and  his  love  of  song 
and  beauty  struggle  with  the  inevitable  sense  of 
Doom.    The  poet  relates  how,  at  a  riotous  feast, 
the  banqueters  are  startled  and  sobered  by  the 
entrance  of  two  mysterious  masquers,  who  at  each 
appearance  carry  off  one  of  the  revellers.     These 
masquers  seem  to  represent  Death  in  its  double 
aspect  of  a  gracious  deliverer  and  as  a  malignant 

[  29  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

demon.     In  passages  it  is  as  finely  descriptive  as 
anything  that  Thomson  ever  wrote : 

"The  lamps  were  quickly  failing; 
The   pictures   were   weird    shadows   on   the 

wall; 
In  the  grey  stone-cold,  dawn-gleams  unpre- 

vailing 
The  draperies  seemed  a  vast  funeral  pall 
Flapping    about    the    corpse    like    sculpture 

wan; 
The    floor,    the    cupola    which    glimmering 

shone, 
The     rain-dark     marbles     in     the     tempest 
thrilled; 
Where  the  noble  feast  was  spread 
Lay    scattered    flower-blooms,     dim    and 
dead, 
Mid  streams  of  sullen-oozing  wine  outspilled 
From  urns  and  goblets  in  a  sick  confusion 
strown; 
And  lost  in  all  the  ghastly  waste, 
On  couches  tottering  and  displaced, 
Flushed  victims  of  the  orgy,  helpless,  sense- 
less, prone." 

Under  a  religious  and  moral  veil,  the  allegory 
of  which  suggests  Poe's  Masque  of  the  Red 
Death,  Thomson  shows  in  this  poem  a  terrible 
despair  on  contemplating  death.    While  the  Good 

[  30  ] 


STUDY  AND  TEACHING 

and  the  Beautiful  conquer,  there  is  a  doubtful  air 
about  their  victory,  as  though  the  poet  were  try- 
ing rather  to  persuade  himself  of  the  triumph 
than  to  celebrate  it. 

The  influence  of  Shelley  is  again  seen,  and  even 
more  clearly,  in  Thomson's  first  poetic  master- 
piece, the  Doom  of  a  City,  a  lyric  allegory 
founded  on  Zobeide's  tale  of  the  Petrified  City, 
in  the  "Arabian  Nights."  In  style  this  poem  is 
very  like  the  Festival  of  Life,  only  on  a  consider- 
ably larger  scale.  It  is  no  trifling  indication  of 
Thomson's  precocity  that  he  could  have  written  so 
good  a  poem  at  twenty-three. 

The  Doom  of  a  City  is  in  four  main  parts. 
The  first  recounts  how  despair  drives  a  poet  to 
embark  alone  in  a  boat,  and  after  a  long  voyage 
beset  by  rather  incomprehensible  monsters,  who 
in  Thomson's  mind  probably  represented  reli- 
gious fears,  to  land  in  a  strange  stone  city.  This 
section  of  the  poem  resembles  Shelley's  Alastor 
in  its  rambling  voyage-structure,  and  in  many  of 
its  mysterious  allegorical  incidents.  Thomson 
himself  realized  that  it  was  prolix,  yet  he  refused 
to  change  or  omit  it. 

In  the  second  part,  there  is  a  description  of  this 
city,  where  all  life  has  turned  to  stone — an  alle- 
gory of  the  stony  insensibility  of  the  human  heart 
when  numbed  by  destiny  and  despair.  It  is  this 
section  which  most  strongly  suggests  the  City  of 
Dreadful  Night,  except  that  this  city  is  of  sense- 

[  31  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

less  stone,  while  that  is  a  ghastly  night-vision  of  a 
living,  moving  metropolis: 

"What  found  I? — Dead  stone  sentries  stony- 
eyed, 

Erect,  steel-sworded,  brass-defended  all, 

Guarding  the  sombrous  gateway  deep  and 
wide 

Hewn  like  a  cavern  through  the  mighty 
wall; 

Stone  statues  all  throughout  the  streets  and 
squares 

Grouped  as  in  social  converse  or  alone; 

Dim  stony  merchants  holding  forth  rich 
wares 

To  catch  the  choice  of  purchasers  of  stone; 

^c  %  5<:  ^t  ^ 

"Over  the  bridge's  sculptured  parapet; 
Statues  in  boats,  amidst  its  sway  and  quiver 
Immovable  as  if  in  ice-waves  set : — 
The  whole  vast  sea  of  life  about  me  lay, 
The  passionate,  heaving,  restless,  sounding 

life, 
With  all  its  tides  and  billows,   foam  and 

spray, 
Arrested  in  full  tumult  of  its  strife 
Frozen  into  a  nightmare's  ghastly  death, 
The  vigorous  heart   and  brain  and  blood 

and  breath 
Stark,  strangled,  coffined  in  eternal  stone." 

[  32  ] 


STUDY  AND  TEACHING 

The  climax  of  the  poem,  "The  Judgment," 
comes  in  the  third  section  of  the  poem,  where  the 
narrator  overhears  God's  Doom  on  the  City.  In 
this  Judgment,  which  has  somehow  the  hall-marks 
of  early  inflicted  Scotch  Presbyterianism  about  it, 
and  whose  manner  is  constantly  reminiscent  of 
Shelley  and  De  Quincey,  the  wicked  statues  crash 
to  dust,  and  the  good  become  free  spirits.  In 
conclusion  there  is  a  triumph-song  of  these  liber- 
ated spirits,  which  indicates  that  Thomson  had 
not  yet  wholly  cast  off  the  old  orthodoxy: 

"As  one  who  in  the  morning-shine 

Reels  homeward,  shameful,  wan,  adust, 
From  orgies  wild  with  fiery  wine 

And  reckless  sin  and  brutish  lust: 
And  sees  a  doorway  open  wide, 

And  then  the  grand  Cathedral  space 
And  hurries  in  to  crouch  and  hide 

His  trembling  frame,  his  branded  face. 

5fC  SJC  afC  3|5  ^ 

"He  sees  the  world-wide  morning  flame 

Through  windows  where  in  glory  shine 
The  saints  who  fought  and  overcame, 

The  martyrs  who  made  death  divine: 
He  sees  pure  women  bent  in  prayer, 

Communing  low  with  God  above: — 
Too  pure !  what  right  has  he  to  share 

Their  silent  feast  of  sacred  love?" 

[  33  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

The  fourth  part,  "The  Return,"  is  calmer  and 
more  didactic  in  tone.  Thomson  here  states  his 
creed  of  life  vaguely  and  uncertainly,  but  not  with- 
out force  and  art.  Like  Shelley  he  considers 
organized  social  institutions,  such  as  the  govern- 
ment and  the  church,  as  tyrannous  and  soulless 
machines.  Their  adherents,  he  thinks,  are  cling- 
ing blindly  to  the  symbol  and  forgetting  the  spirit- 
ual forces  which  the  symbol  was  created  to  repre- 
sent. Yet  unlike  Shelley  or  Leopardi,  Thomson 
had  no  strong  constructive  vision  of  the  elements 
which  must  be  built  up  to  replace  these  outworn 
institutions.  In  his  fierce  invective  he  has  drawn 
so  grim  and  sombre  a  background  for  his  ideal- 
ism, that  his  positive  and  more  hopeful  beliefs 
are  engulfed  by  the  shadows  of  it.  The  poem 
reveals  the  poet's  religious  views  in  their  deepen- 
ing development.  Despite  some  lines  of  noble 
certainty,  there  is  the  same  doubtful  and  wistful 
rhetoric  about  his  statement  of  his  belief  in  the 
immortality  of  the  human  soul,  and  the  benevo- 
lence of  an  overruling  God.  Here,  as  later  in 
the  Lady  of  Sorrow,  he  is  tortured  by  fatalism, 
and  ponders  on  the  transmigration  of  souls. 
Years  after,  in  the  highly  biographical  Vane's 
Story,  Thomson  stated  very  frankly  the  spiritual 
agony  through  which  he  was  passing  at  this  time: 

"I  half  remember,  years  ago, 
Fits  of  despair  that  maddened  woe, 

[  34  ] 


STUDY  AND  TEACHING 

Frantic  remorse,  intense  self  scorn, 

And  yearnings  harder  to  be  borne 

Of  utter  loneliness  forlorn; 

What  passionate  secret  prayers  I  prayed! 

What  futile  firm  resolves  I  made ! 

As  well  a  thorn  might  pray  to  be 

Transformed  into  an  olive  tree; 

The  /  am  that  I  am  of  God 

Defines  no  less  a  worm  or  clod, 

My  penitence  was  honest  guile; 

My  inmost  being  all  the  while 

Was  laughing  in  a  patient  mood 

At  this  extreme  solicitude, 

Was  waiting  laughing  till  once  more 

I  should  be  sane  as  heretofore; 

And  in  the  pauses  of  the  fits 

That  rent  my  heart  and  scared  my  wits, 

Its  pleasant  mockery  whispered  through, 

Oh,  what  can  Saadi  have  to  do 

With  penitence?  and  what  can  you? 

And  Shiraz  roses  wreathed  with  rue?" 

So,  torn  between  his  artistic  delight  in  beauty, 
his  pangs  as  a  fatalist  and  a  hopeless  lover,  and 
his  mocking  laughter  at  the  incongruity  of  his 
feelings  about  both,  his  first  great  creative  year 
passed.  He  wrote  other  and  less  significant 
poems  this  year  also :  The  Purple  Flower  of  the 
Heath,  a  romantic  ballad-tragedy  set  in  the 
Middle  Ages  of  the  Gothic  revival;  A  Chant  and 

[  35  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

Withered  Leaves,  both  exquisite  but  rather  tenu- 
ous laments;  and  a  highly  biographical  poem 
written  on  his  twenty-third  birthday,  which  was 
never  included  in  the  collected  editions  of  his 
works,  but  which  is  the  key  to  the  Festival  of 
Life  and  the  Doom  of  a  City  in  its  confessional 
frankness.  He  seems  melancholy  alike  over  his 
wasted  years  and  his  apparently  hopeless  future. 
He  finds  the  dull  routine  of  his  life  almost  intol- 
erable. He  can  likewise  realize  the  subtle  temp- 
tations and  inevitable  perils  of  dissipation.  Yet 
the  poem  ends  with  a  trumpet-call  to  the  fight 
which  defies  even  Fate  itself.  This  refusal  to 
submit  is  what  makes  Thomson's  life  and  his 
poems  so  nobly  tragic.  Even  at  the  end  of  that 
terrible  masterpiece,  the  City  of  Dreadful  Night, 
the  reader  finds  him  defiant,  as  he  was  at  twenty- 
three: 

"Meanwhile,  then,  let  me  wait  and  hope,  and 
learn 
To  curb  with  galling  steel  and  ruthless 
hand 
These  strong  and  passionate  impulses  that 
burn 
To  sweep  me  from  my  post  of  self-com- 
mand 
Into  the  battle  raging  thick  and  stern, 
Into    the     desert's     freedom    vast    and 
grand; 

[  36  ] 


STUDY  AND  TEACHING 

That  horseman  proves  full  strength,  firm 

skill  indeed, 
Who  holdeth  statue-calm  his  savage  steed." 

The  outward  events  of  this  period  of  the  poet's 
life  were  few  and  colorless.  Occasional  letters 
written  by  him  to  Agnes  Gray  in  1858  reveal,  in 
spite  of  their  vivacious  style,  a  monotonous  exist- 
ence of  routine  and  hearsay,  rather  than  inde- 
pendent action: 

"...  your  humble  servant  has  spent  six 
weeks  in  another  Barracks  since  he  had  the 
honor  of  writing  you  last,  and  is  now  attached 
to  the  55th  Foot.  Whither  this  noble  corps 
will  be  sent  no  one  just  now  ventures  to  guess. 
Lately,  vague  rumors  were  afloat  of  its 
transportation  to  India.  Probably,  however, 
a  tender  government  would  preserve  the 
precious  dominie,  even  when  banishing  his 
regiment.  One  of  our  class  died  out  there 
not  long  since — a  thin,  wiry  fellow  who 
promised  to  endure  all  climates  with  the  sal- 
low tenacity  of  parchment.  .  .  .  With  re- 
gard to  the  Piano,  I  shall  indeed  be  rejoiced 
to  hear  you  playing  some  fine  day,  but,  for 
myself,  I  am  utterly  innocent  of  the  art." 

The  year  1858  did  not  prove  so  productive  of 
poetry  as   1857.     Thomson  wrote  this  year  the 

[  37  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

Fadeless  Bower,  a  narrative  verse  autobiography 
of  his  unforgotten  love  affair,  and  the  alternate 
torture  and  exaltation  which  its  memory  afforded 
him.  It  is  perhaps  the  tenderest  and  most  pen- 
sive of  Thomson's  poems,  and  appeared  in  Tail's 
Edinburgh  Review  for  July,  over  the  signature  of 
"Crepusculus."  This  is  only  one  of  many  poems 
which  the  lonely  army  schoolmaster  now  began  to 
contribute  to  the  minor  magazines  of  the  time, 
such  as  Bradlaugh's  London  Investigator,  and 
later  his  National  Reformer.  Thomson  about  this 
time  adopted  the  pen-name,  "Bysshe  Vanolis,"  or, 
as  he  generally  printed  it,  "B.  V."  So  consistently 
did  he  employ  this  nom  de  plume  in  print,  that 
admirers  like  Dobell  had  at  first  no  knowledge  of 
the  poet's  real  name.  The  same  year  that  marks 
Thomson's  entry  into  periodical  literature  also 
includes  the  production  of  a  few  minor  but  inter- 
esting poems,  such  as  the  Requiem,  the  Winter1  s 
Night,  Cypress  and  Roses,  the  biographical  At 
Death's  Door  and  the  Recusant,  which  is  the 
poet's  last  regretful  yearning  for  the  comfort- 
able repose  of  the  Christian  church.  Hereafter 
Thomson  is  not  gracious,  but  fiercely  indignant 
with  the  orthodox  creed,  with  an  ironic  bitterness 
which  betrays  his  severe  youthful  experiences  with 
religion.  Thomson  was  never  an  unreligious 
man,  and  could  never  forget  religious  questions 
for  long.  Henceforward  he  is  either  sorrowing 
over  the  beauties  of  a  consolation  from  which  he 

[  38  ] 


STUDY  AND  TEACHING 

finds   himself   debarred,   or   else   he   is   savagely 
irreverent   at   what   to   him    is    a    deceptive    and  ; 
mocking  delusion.  ^ 

Thomson  spent  1859  with  his  regiment  in  Ire- 
land. In  letters  to  various  friends  he  has  left  a 
vivid  picture  of  this  rough  and  ready  life,  in  which 
he  mixed  as  a  boon  and  cheerful  companion,  and 
yet  which  occupied  only  the  fringes  of  his  mind: 

"The  move  has  come,  and  we  are  now  set- 
tled in  this  camp.  Imagine  an  undulating 
sea  of  grass,  here  and  there  rising  into  hil- 
locks, and  spotted  with  patches  of  flowerless 
furze.  In  the  midst,  on  a  slightly  elevated 
ridge,  stretches  for  about  a  mile  the  camp, 
consisting  of  ten  squares  of  dingy  red  huts — 
each  square  holding  a  regiment — with  a 
somewhat  irregular  accompaniment  of  can- 
teens, wash-houses,  hospitals,  huts  for  the 
staff,  etc.  In  the  center  of  a  line,  chosen 
probably  as  the  highest  spot,  stands  the 
Church,  the  Chapel  (Roman  Catholic)  and 
the  Clock-tower:  at  the  extremities  are  the 
white  tents  of  artillery  and  Dragoons.  It  is 
a  fine  place  for  freedom  and  expanse,  and 
in  itself  much  pleasanter  than  Aldershot, 
though  I  could  wish  to  be  there  for  the  sake 
of  its  nearness  to  London.  Aldershot  is  set 
amidst  dark  heath,  the  Curragh  amidst 
green  grass,   and  the  difference  is  like  that 

[  39  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

between  cloudy  and  sunshiny  weather.  It  is 
good  to  get  out  here  from  a  town.  The  sky 
is  seen,  not  in  patches,  but  broad,  complete 
and  sea-like;  the  distance  where  low  blue 
hills  float  in  the  horizon  is  also  sea-like,  and 
the  incorrupted  air  sweeps  over  us  broad  and 
free  as  an  ocean.  ...  I  have  very  good 
quarters  for  the  camp,  better  probably  than 
most  of  the  officers.  Two  rooms,  one  of 
them  papered,  forming  the  end  of  the  school 
hut,  are  something  to  boast  of  for  a  habita- 
tion. 

"The  camp  is  now  about  full.  Between 
two  and  three  miles  off  is  the  village  of  New- 
bridge, a  cavalry  station.  Here  and  there 
the  troopers  must  number  nearly  ten  thou- 
sand men.  So  that  with  the  assistance  of 
those  in  Dublin,  we  ought  to  get  up  a  good 
'Field-day'  or  Review  for  Her  Majesty, 
should  she  come  over,  as  is  expected.  Lord 
Seaton,  the  Commander-in-Chief  for  Ire- 
land, is  here,  with  all  sorts  of  generals,  staff- 
officers  and  aides-de-camp.  I  wish  you  could 
have  seen  the  whole  division  the  other  day, 
as  they  marched  past  before  the  great  man. 
The  Horse  Artillery  careering  as  if  their 
guns  were  cabs  and  carriages;  the  more  sober 
Foot-Artillery  and  Military  Train;  the  Scots 
Grays  with  their  bearskins  like  mounted 
Guardsmen;    the    Royal    Dragoons,    brass- 

[  40  ] 


STUDY  AND  TEACHING 

helmeted;  the  5th  Irish  Lancers  looking 
splendid,  like  chivalry  of  old,  with  lances 
erect,  and  each  topped  with  its  red  and  white 
pennon;  then  regiment  after  regiment  of 
infantry,  including  a  battalion  of  the  Fusilier 
Guards;  each  corps  marching  past  to  the 
music  of  its  own  band,  the  Fusiliers  having 
their  bagpipes.  Then  there  were  aides-de- 
camp and  regimental  field-officers  galloping 
about  in  all  directions,  swift  and  brilliant  as 
butterflies;  mere  butterflies,  many  of  them, 
but  very  pleasant  and  exciting  to  look  at." 

The  poems  written  in  1859  show  the  same 
curious  alternation  between  cheerful  aspiration,: 
and  the  fatalistic  sorrow  of  the  pessimist.  A 
Happy  Poet  is  perhaps  the  most  objective  poem 
he  ever  composed.  Here  Thomson  feels  that  all 
the  pageant  of  humanity,  sorrowful  or  joyous  by 
turns,  is  apart  from  him  because  of  his  position 
as  an  observing  artist : 

"How  vast  the  stage  I 
Imperious  Doom,  unvanquishable  will, 
Throughout     the     Drama    constant     battle 
wage; 
The  plot  evolves  with  tangled  good  and 
ill; 
The  passions  overflood  the  Shores  of  Time; 
With  God  the  full  solution  waits  sublime." 

[  41  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

Had  Thomson  usually  possessed  this  power  of 
looking  at  the  world  objectively,  he  would  have 
been  far  less  pessimistic  in  his  general  feeling 
toward  life.  As  it  was,  he  brooded  over  his  own 
emotions  and  ideas  to  such  a  dangerous  extent 
that  his  consciousness  turned  upon  itself,  and  the 
sombre  pessimism  of  the  City  resulted.  The 
escape  from  this  tragic  mood  lay  partly  in  his 
creative  artistic  powers,  as  he  saw  himself  in  a 
later  stanza  of  A  Happy  Poet: 

"For  I  must  sing  of  all  I  feel  and  know; 
Waiting  with  Memnon  passive  near  the 
palms, 
Until   the   heavenly  light   doth   dawn   and 
glow 
And  thrill  my  silence  into  mystic  psalms; 
From   unknown   realms   the   wind   streams 
sad  or  gay, 
The   trees   give   voice   responsive   to   its 
sway." 

The  Poet  of  this  poem,  who  of  course  is  only 
Thomson  in  one  of  his  happier  moods,  feels  that 
life  is  good  and  beautiful,  and  that  he  can  find 
happiness  in  singing  its  praises.  This  attractive 
program,  however,  he  was  never  destined  con- 
sistently to  fulfill. 

Much  the  same  cheerful  philosophy,  however, 
appears   in   another  poem  written   in    1859,   ^c 

[  42  ] 


STUDY  AND  TEACHING 

Lord  of  the  Castle  of  Indolence,  in  the  old  Spen- 
serian stanzas  of  his  better  known  namesake. 
Into  the  dreamy  sweetness  of  the  stanza  there  is 
introduced  a  calm  Oriental  resignation,  and  a 
strand  or  two  of  the  inevitable  fatalism : 

"How  men  will  strain  to   row  against  the 

tide, 
Which  yet  must  sweep  them  down  in  its 

career; 
Or  if  some  win  their  way  and  crown  their 

pride 
What  do  they  win?  the  desert  wild  and 

drear, 
The     savage     rocks,     the     icy     wastes 

austere." 

While  the  indifference  to  the  future  in  this  poem 
is  not  characteristic  of  Thomson's  commoner  and 
deeper  theories  of  both  life  and  art,  yet  it  does 
reveal  a  careless,  indolent  side  to  his  nature  which 
many  phases  of  his  life  and  of  his  poems  bear 
witness  to,  as  for  example  his  essay  on  Indolence. 
Yet  for  the  most  part  he  was  destined  to  the 
nobler  though  more  tragic  life  of  those  who 
"strain  to  row  against  the  tide." 

An  Old  Dream,  another  poem  written  in  1859, 
is  done  in  imitation  of  the  Blessed  Damosel. 
Where  Rossetti  was  unconsciously  prophesying 
the  death  of  his  beloved,  however,  Thomson  nar- 

[  43  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

rates  an  actual  experience.  He  preserves  the 
same  hushed,  sweet  music,  and  there  is  none  of  his 
usual  rapturous  delight  or  fiery  indignation  in  it. 
It  is  not  so  much  a  poem  of  personal  feeling  as 
of  subtly  beautiful  atmosphere: 

"And  up  the  music-moonlit  sea 
They  floated  calm  and  slow, 

So  that  it  rather  seemed  to  be 
The  earth  was  sinking  low 

Than  that  they  soared,  so  steadfastly 
Ascending  they  did  go." 

In  the  Deliverer  Thomson  relates,  with  more 
personal  feeling  and  lyric  intensity,  the  saving 
values  of  his  vision  of  Matilda,  to  his  gloomy, 
oppressed  mind.  The  Real  Vision  of  Sin  was 
written  in  irritation  at  Tennyson's  languidly  beau- 
tiful Vision  of  Sin,  which  to  Thomson  was  utterly 
artificial  and  insincere.  The  Scotchman's  instinct 
for  truth  prompted  him  here  to  draw  a  hideous 
picture  of  real  sin.  But  the  account  of  this  poetic 
year  is  incomplete  without  mention  of  Mater 
Tenebrarum,  an  outburst  of  sensuous  anguish  at 
his  bereavement.  The  gathering  gloom  and 
increasing  melancholy  of  his  nature  here  find  a 
fiery  Swinburnian  utterance.  He  cries  out  in  the 
night  at  the  thought  that  perhaps  his  love  is  dead 
in  soul  as  well  as  body: 

[44  ] 


STUDY  AND  TEACHING 

"In  the  endless  nights,  from  my  bed,  where 

sleepless  in  frenzy  I  lie, 
I  cleave  through  the  crushing  gloom  with  a 

bitter  and  deadly  cry: 
Oh!  where  have  they  taken  my  Love  from 

our  Eden  of  bliss  on  this  earth, 
Which  now  is  a  frozen  waste  of  sepulchral 

and  horrible  dearth? 
Have  they  killed  her  indeed?  is  her  soul  as 

her  body,  which  long 
Has  mouldered  away  in  the  dust  where  the 

foul  worms  throng? 
O'er  what  abhorrent  Lethes,  to  what   re- 
motest star, 
Is   she   rapt   away  from   my  pursuit   thru' 

cycles  and  systems  far? 
She  is  dead,  she  is  utterly  dead;  for  her  life 

would  hear  and  speed 
To  the  wild  imploring  cry  of  my  heart  that 

cries  in  its  dreadful  need." 

Thomson  finds 

"No  hope  in  this  worn-out  world,  no  hope 
beyond  the  tomb; 
No  living  and  loving  God,   but  blind  and 
stony  Doom." 

For  the  first  time  recorded  in  his  poems,  he  is 
half  minded  to  commit  suicide  and  end  it  all.  Yet 
here,  as  later,  there  remains  in  him: 

[  45  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

"A  fire  of  dread,  a  light  of  hope,  kindled,  O 

Love,  by  thee; 
For  thy  pure  and  gentle  and  beautiful  soul, 

it  must  immortal  be." 

It  is  just  this  unquenchable  glimmer  of  hope  that 
prevented  his  suicide  always,  that  lent  nobility  to 
his  life  struggle,  and  genius  to  his  most  pessi- 
mistic poems. 

The  details  of  the  poet's  life  during  i860  are 
as  shadowy  as  during  1858  or  1859.  Most  of  his 
correspondence  seems  to  have  been  with  Agnes 
Gray,  and  in  his  usual  bantering  tone: 

"How  have  I  offended  you  by  irreverent 
allusions  to  our  Future  Abode?  By  saying 
that  you  will  go  to  heaven?  that  I  shall  go? 
that  we  shall  meet  there?  that  you  will  play 
the  harp  there?  that  I  shall  hear  you  harp- 
playing  there?  that  your  said  harp-playing 
there  will  afford  a  criterion  of  your  piano- 
forte-playing here?  that  I  shall  be  able  to 
apply  this  criterion  there?  By  which  or  by 
all,  have  I  shocked  you?  ...  I  beseech 
pardon. 

"Miss  Helen  shocks  me.  Twenty-four 
pounds  sterling  scarcely  sufficient  to  keep  her 
in  dress!  I  think  that  teachers  in  Ragged 
Schools  should  go  clothed  in  rags,  humbling 
themselves  in  sympathy  with  their  scholars, 

[  46  ] 


STUDY  AND  TEACHING 

and  thus  winning  their  confidence.  How  can 
tattered  fustian  and  cotton  believe  that  silk 
and  lace  have  any  affection  for  them?  .  .  . 
However,  I  give  up  the  scheme  on  account  of 
the  sweetheart.  I  suppose  she  will  soon  be 
married,  for  after  profound  calculation,  I 
have  discovered  that  she  is  three  or  four 
months  over  twenty.  ...  As  for  you,  most 
venerable  of  women,  you  will  be  eighteen 
next  month,  will  you  not?  I  wish  the  world 
would  stand  still  a  while,  and  not  bring  on 
grey  hairs  at  this  alarming  rate. 

"My  good  friends  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Barnes 
expect  to  go  to  London  soon,  he  as  Garrison 
Schoolmaster  there.  Please  ask  Mr.  and 
Mrs.  Gray  if  I  may  give  the  Barneses  a  note 
of  introduction  to  you  all.  They  are  really 
good  people.  Mr.  B.  is  clever,  intelligent, 
full  of  fun  and  humor,  honest,  kindly  and 
genial.  I  am  bound  to  confess  that  his  con- 
versation is  dashed  with  that  roughness  to 
which  we  unfortunates,  knocked  about  hither 
and  thither  into  involuntary  intimacy  with 
each  other  in  the  Army,  get,  and  must  get, 
pretty  well  used  to.  .    .    . 

"Mrs.  Barnes  I  like  even  better.  She  is 
very  reserved  at  first,  but  quite  motherly  and 
womanly  when  one  gets  to  know  her  well. 
Both  have  treated  me  with  great  and  rare 
kindness." 

[  47  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

The  year  i860  proved  a  lull  in  Thomson's 
poetic  career.  He  wrote  only  four  poems  that 
have  survived,  and  three  of  these  were  occasional. 
The  Two  Sonnets,  wherein  he  is  thinking  of  him- 
self and  his  fate,  reveal  his  attitude  toward  his 
art.  He  finds  that  his  songs  are  all  sad,  but  that 
only  in  sadness  can  he  attain  true  poetry.  The 
concluding  couplet  is  epigrammatic,  and  remark- 
ably truthful: 

"My  mirth  can  laugh  and  talk,  but  cannot 
sing; 
My  grief  finds  harmonies  in  everything." 

Outwardly,  no  doubt,  Thomson  was  the  same 
witty  and  engaging  comrade  that  he  had  always 
been.  Yet  his  growing  melancholy  he  now  recog- 
nized as  his  sincerest  and  most  powerful  impulse. 
Thomson  was  shifted  in  i860  from  Curragh 
Camp  to  Aldershot,  a  change  for  which  he  was 
apparently  grateful,  as  Ireland  had  come  to  be  a 
land  of  painful  memories  to  him.  Also,  he  now 
found  himself  near  to  his  childhood  friends,  the 
Grays,  to  whom  he  at  once  paid  a  visit  which  had 
rather  significant  results.  It  must  be  remembered 
that  before  going  to  Ireland,  Thomson  had  been 
quite  intimate  with  Helen  Gray,  and  had  corre- 
sponded with  her.  In  September,  i860,  when  he 
called  on  the  family,  he  found  her  engaged.  His 
visit  has  been  described  by  Agnes  Gray  (Mrs. 
Grieg),  the  younger  sister: 

[  48  ] 


STUDY  AND  TEACHING 

"At  last  he  wrote  saying  that  he  was  to 
have  a  fortnight's  holiday,  and  would  pay  us 
a  visit.  We  were  all  excitement  at  his  com- 
ing. I  had  previously  informed  him  in  one 
of  my  letters  that  Helen  had  become  a 
Ragged  School  teacher,  and  in  reply  he  said 
that  he  could  not  imagine  a  creature  so  bright 
and  in  his  remembrance  so  beautiful  being 
arrayed  in  sombre  habiliments,  and  acting 
such  a  character.  .  .  .  During  this  visit  we 
thought  him  much  altered  in  appearance  and 
manners,  indeed,  we  were  somewhat  dis- 
appointed. He  was  by  no  means  so  manly 
looking  as  when  he  left  London,  and  was 
painfully  silent  and  depressed.  He  went 
from  us  with  the  intention  of  again  going  to 
Aldershot,  but  from  that  day  until  Mr.  Mac- 
call  mentioned  him  to  us,  we  never  once 
heard  of  him.  Ever  since  we  have  felt 
greatly  puzzled  to  account  for  his  singular 
conduct." 

Thomson's  remissness,  which  the  Grays  could 
not  understand,  is  no  puzzle  to  us  now.  They 
probably  knew  nothing  of  his  lost  love  at  Bal- 
lincollig,  and  his  usual  reticence  in  talking  about 
himself  or  his  depression  probably  deepened  the 
mystery  to  them.  Yet  there  was  another  element 
in  his  attitude  which  brought  on  melancholy  dur- 
ing his  stay  at  their  home,  and  which  probably 

[  49  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

caused  his  unexpected  silence  afterward.  This 
was  a  brief  but  intense  revival  of  his  early  love 
for  Helen  Gray,  which  is  shown  in  the  sad  and 
obviously  sincere  Meeting  Again: 

"And  now  again,  after  long  bitter  years, 
We  are  allowed  to  meet 
And  mingle  henceforth   all  our  sighs   and 
tears 
While  these  two  hearts  shall  beat. 

"Ah !   can  you   really  love   me,   whom  you 
know 
So  weak  and  foul  of  yore? 
Dear  Heart!  /  feel  that  evil  long-ago 
But  makes  me  love  you  more. 

"Yet  still  that  longing  almost  swayeth  me — 

That  we  should  sink  down  deep, 
And  side  by  side,  from  life's  sore  burden 
free, 
Sleep  death's  eternal  sleep." 

Thomson  was  thus  torn  between  two  impos- 
sible affections — one,  that  life-long  and  passionate 
reverence  for  the  dead  Matilda,  and  the  other, 
this  rebirth  of  an  earlier  love  for  a  woman  al- 
ready engaged  to  marry  another.  It  is  only  nat- 
ural that  Thomson  should  have  tried  to  put  Helen 
Gray  out  of  mind,  for  she  could  not  be  his,  de- 
spite the  pathetic  hope  of  his  melancholy  poem. 

[  50  ] 


STUDY  AND  TEACHING 

Moreover,  it  must  have  been  painful  to  him  to 
feel  that  he  was  blurring  the  memory  of  Matilda, 
for  this  had  come  to  be  the  lodestone  of  all  his 
dreams  and  hopes.  His  way  out  of  the  diffi- 
culty— to  avoid  their  house  and  all  correspond- 
ence with  them — was  in  reality  the  noblest  and 
best,  however  much  the  unsuspecting  and  kind- 
hearted  Grays  were  hurt  by  it. 

Meanwhile  Thomson  was  getting  into  print. 
He  found  time  amid  the  exacting  routine  of  his 
teaching  to  write  his  first  essay  on  Shelley,  and 
it  was  printed  in  the  National  Reformer.  The 
latter  magazine  was  founded  this  very  year  by 
Charles  Bradlaugh,  an  old  friend  of  the  poet's, 
who  was  destined  to  be  one  of  his  most  influen- 
tial friends  during  the  remainder  of  his  life. 
Thomson  had  first  met  Bradlaugh  when  the  latter 
was  a  private  soldier  at  Ballincollig,  and  they  had 
read  and  talked  much  together  there.  There  is 
a  story  that  during  summer  evenings  Thomson 
used  to  walk  up  and  down  with  Bradlaugh  while 
the  latter  was  on  picket  duty,  discussing  society, 
politics  and  religion.  Bradlaugh  had  been  from 
their  first  acquaintance  a  radical  in  politics,  and, 
with  the  National  Reformer  as  an  organ,  soon 
made  his  name  unmentionable  to  English  ears 
polite.  He  was  impulsive  and  generous,  with  all 
the  positiveness  of  opinion  and  boundless  ambi- 
tion of  the  reformer.  Mr.  Dobell  in  his  memoir 
of  Thomson  regretted,  not  without  justice,  that 

[  51  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

Bradlaugh  was  an  Englishman  rather  than  an 
American.  Bradlaugh's  reputation  in  England 
can  be  understood  when  it  is  realized  that  he  was 
already  urging  control  of  births,  and  some  of  the 
more  advanced  views  of  the  modern  eugenists, 
upon  Mid- Victorian  England.  He  was  likewise 
an  honest  zealot  in  the  cause  of  a  more  demo- 
cratic government,  and  not  at  all  orthodox  in  his 
religious  creed.  In  the  two  latter  directions  he 
was  destined  to  exert  considerable  influence  on 
the  more  hesitating  and  uncertain  genius  of 
Thomson.  Bradlaugh  had  corresponded  with  the 
poet  ever  since  their  separation  in  Ireland  in 
1853,  and  on  the  organization  of  the  National 
Reformer,  he  urged  Thomson  to  contribute  to  it. 
During  the  next  fifteen  years  his  old  friend 
printed  in  it  his  critical  essays,  and  some  of  his 
finest  poems.  One  of  the  first  poems  contributed 
was  the  Dead  Year,  a  darkly  powerful  lyric  alle- 
gory which  sums  up  the  events  of  the  year  i860, 
after  the  fashion  of  Dryden's  Annus  Mirabilis. 
Despite  the  poet's  approval  of  the  democratic  up- 
heaval in  Italy,  whereon  he  sets  the  poetic  bless- 
ing of  Dante  and  Shelley,  nevertheless  he  finds 
the  world  sad  and  filled  with  gloomy,  purposeless 
slaughter.  The  "confirmation  of  the  old  de- 
spair" had  now  grown  into  a  stern,  biting  utter- 
ance of  the  wrongs  of  the  world. 

Thomson's  poetic  tribute  to  Shelley,  who  had 
proved  the  strongest  influence  on  the  early  years 

[  52  ] 


STUDY  AND  TEACHING 

of  his  own  artistic  development,  was  written  in 
the  next  year.     Thomson's  view  of  the  "poet  of 
poets"    is   expressed   in    an    allegorical   narrative  / 
poem  much  akin  in  spirit  to  Matthew  Arnold's  | 
more  famous  prose  description  of  the  "beautiful  j 
and    ineffectual    angel,    beating    in    the    void    his  ' 
luminous  wings  in  vain."     Thomson's  Shelley  is 
written    in   the   seven-line    Chaucerian    stanza    of 
which  the  latter  poet  is  said  to  have  been  fond. 
Thomson's  great  love  for  Shelley  is  due  to  the 
obvious  similarities  of  their  opinions.     Both  were 
radicals   in   politics   and   creeds,    both   celebrated 
love  in  passionate  poetry  of  a  symbolic  nature, 
both  were  idealists  and  grew  sad  that  the  real 
world  should  differ  so  vastly  from  the  world  of 
their   imagination.      Yet   the    disciple    lacks    that 
noble  though  questionable  philosophy  of  sin,  and 
that  glowing  vision  of  the  glories  of  the  future 
world. 

Thomson  also  paid  his  tribute  to  Elizabeth 
Barrett  Browning,  who  died  in  1861.  He  had 
long  been  an  admirer  of  her  poems,  as  is  seen 
from  his  letters  from  Ireland  to  Agnes  Gray  in 
the  fifties.  His  fine  eulogy  of  the  dead  poetess 
concludes: 

"Keats  and  Shelley  sleep  at  Rome, 

She  in  well-loved  Tuscan  earth; 
Finding  all  their  death's  long  home 

Far  from  their  old  home  of  birth. 

[  53  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

Italy,  you  hold  in  trust 
Very  sacred  English  dust." 

But  although  only  three  poems  have  survived 
from  1 86 1,  the  last,  To  Our  Ladies  of  Death,  is 
one  of  Thomson's  greatest  and  most  character- 
istic poems.  His  prayer  for  oblivion  had  been 
uttered  before  in  Mater  Tenebrarum,  but  with  a 
more  restless  and  uncertain  anguish.  In  the 
Ladies  of  Death  the  passion  is  more  pure,  and 
the  style  is  more  direct,  and  more  majestically 
powerful.  There  are  no  doubts  or  expectations 
here,  but  a  calm  acceptance  of  natural  laws.  The 
holy  Lady  of  Beatitudes,  who  represents  individ- 
ual and  conscious  immortality,  and  the  horrible 
Lady  of  Annihilation,  who  represents  eternal 
death,  in  turn  appear  before  the  poet  but  fail  to 
solace  him.  Last  comes  the  Lady  of  Oblivion, 
the  spirit  of  peaceful  fusion  into  the  world-spirit. 
Of  her  he  says: 

"Thou    hauntest    twilight    regions,    and   the 
trance 
Of  moonless  nights  when  stars  are  few 
and  wan 
Within  black  woods;  or  over  the  expanse 

Of  desert  seas  abysmal;  or  upon 
Old  solitary  shores  whose  populous  graves 
Are  rocked  in  rest  by  ever-moaning  waves, 
Or  through  vast  ruined  cities  still  and  lone. 

[  54  ] 


STUDY  AND  TEACHING 

"The  weak,  the  weary,  and  the  desolate, 

The   poor,    the   mean,    the   outcast,    the 
opprest, 
All   trodden   down   beneath  the   march   of 
Fate, 
Thou    gatherest,    loving    Sister,    to    thy 
breast. 
Soothing  their  pain  and  weariness  asleep, 
There  in  thy  hidden  Dreamland  hushed  and 

deep 
Dost  lay  them,  shrouded  in  eternal  rest." 

The  poet  realizes  the  eternal  interchange  of 
matter,  and  knows  that  in  his  corporeal  sub- 
stance he  will  again  enter  into  living  things.  Yet 
his  prayer  for  himself,  like  Shakespeare's  great 
sonnet,  "Tired  with  all  these,  for  restful  death  I 
cry,"  is  for  the  peaceful  oblivion  which  only  death 
can  bestow  upon  him: 

"Weary  of  living  isolated  life, 

Weary  of  hoping  hopes  for-ever  vain, 
Weary  of  struggling  in  all-sterile  strife, 
Weary  of  thought  which  maketh  nothing 
plain, 
I  close  my  eyes  and  hush  my  panting  breath, 
And    yearn    for    Thee,    divinely    tranquil 

Death 
To  come  and  soothe  away  my  bitter  pain." 

[  55  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

In  more  ways  than  one,  this  great  poem  points 
forward  with  sombre  insistence  to  the  City  of 
Dreadful  Night.  The  peculiarly  effective  stanza 
form  in  which  it  and  the  later  City  are  written, 
was,  as  Thomson  himself  afterwards  confessed, 
taken  from  Browning's  Guardian  Angel,  it  is  an 
ironic  fact  that  the  most  optimistic  English  poet 
should  thus  provide  for  the  most  pessimistic  of 
English  poets  a  vehicle  for  the  most  pessimistic 
poem  in  the  English  language.  It  is  noteworthy 
that  in  Browning's  poem  the  fifth  and  sixth  lines 
end  with  a  feminine  couplet.  Thomson  in  the 
Ladies  of  Death  made  this  couplet  a  masculine 
rhyme.  Later  in  the  City  of  Dreadful  Night  he 
restored  the  feminine  couplet  as  he  had  found  it 
in  Browning.  That  the  stanza  of  the  Ladies  of 
Death  is  not  as  effective  as  that  of  the  Guardian 
Angel  or  the  City,  is  quite  obvious.  In  the  latter 
poems  the  feminine  couplet  produces  a  passionate 
unrest,  a  hovering  uncertainty,  which  the  mascu- 
line last  line  solves,  closing  the  stanza  with  firm- 
ness and  power. 

Thomson  had  taught  in  the  army  for  ten  years 
when  his  connection  with  teaching  was  severed 
forever.  This  change  took  place  in  October, 
1862,  and  it  marks  with  no  little  clearness  the  end 
of  an  epoch  in  his  life.  There  seems  to  be  some 
doubt  as  to  the  exact  circumstances  of  the  poet's 
dismissal  from  the  army,  and  certain  critics  and 

[  56  ] 


STUDY  AND  TEACHING 

reviewers  have  questioned,   but  apparently  with- 
out justification,  Mr.  Salt's  account  of  the  affair: 

"In  1862,  when  his  regiment  was  at  Ports- 
mouth, it  chanced  that  Thomson  went  on  a 
visit  to  a  fellow  schoolmaster  at  Aldershot, 
and  in  the  course  of  a  stroll  in  the  neighbor- 
hood of  the  camp,  one  of  the  party,  out  of 
bravado  or  for  a  wager,  swam  out  to  a  boat 
which  was  moored  on  a  pond  where  bathing 
was  prohibited.  An  officer  demanded  the 
names  of  those  present,  and  on  this  being  re- 
fused, further  altercation  followed,  with  the 
result  that  a  court-martial  was  held  on  the 
recalcitrant  schoolmasters.  No  real  blame 
seems  to  have  been  attached  to  Thomson, 
but  he  paid  the  penalty  of  being  one  of  the 
incriminated  party,  and  was  discharged  from 
the  service  on  October  30,  1862." 

Thomson's  first  dated  poem,  Love's  Dawn, 
had  been  written  in  1852.  His  last  poem  writ- 
ten while  still  a  teacher  was  the  Ladies  of  Death, 
in  1862.  In  these  ten  years  he  had  served  his 
apprenticeship  to  verse,  and  his  last  poem  shows 
his  powers  almost  matured,  and  his  technique 
almost  perfected.  Except  for  the  Ladies  of 
Death,  none  of  these  poems  would  have  survived 
had  his  poetic  career  terminated  here.  On  the 
whole,  Thomson's  life  in  the  army  was  probably 

[  57  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

an  advantage  to  him.  He  had  been  long  sta- 
tioned in  the  country,  and  his  later  poems  attest 
a  keen  acquaintance  with  nature  by  their  striking 
metaphors  and  unexpectedly  graphic  details.  Had 
he  gained  all  his  imagery  from  books,  he  could 
never  have  written  the  City  of  Dreadful  Night. 
On  the  other  hand,  the  loose,  rough  camp  life  no 
doubt  developed  his  craving  for  alcohol,  which 
cast  so  sinister  a  shadow  over  his  later  years.  It 
also  accustomed  him  to  roughing  it  alone,  and  did 
much  to  develop  the  Bohemianism  latent  in  his 
temperament. 


[  58  ] 


CHAPTER  IV 
HACKWORK  IN  LONDON  (i  862-1 870) 

HPHOMSON'S  dismissal  from  the  army  was  so 
-*■  sudden  that  he  was  left  in  doubt  how  he 
would  make  his  living.  He  naturally  thought  of 
hack-writing,  but  wished  to  procure  some  other 
employment  that  would  tide  him  over  immediate 
expenses  until  that  notoriously  ill-paid  occupation 
should  prove  a  sufficient  source  of  income.  Brad- 
laugh,  to  whose  National  Reformer  Thomson 
had  contributed  for  several  years,  at  once  got  the 
poet  a  position  in  the  office  of  a  London  solicitor, 
of  which  he  was  the  manager,  opened  the  columns 
of  his  paper  to  him,  and  took  him  into  his  own 
home  in  Tottenham,  where  Thomson  remained 
for  the  next  four  years.  Bradlaugh's  young 
daughters,  Alice  and  Hypatia,  were  very  fond  of 
the  poet,  as  indeed  most  children  seem  to  have 
been  all  through  his  life.  He  took  them  to  the 
theatre,  told  them  fairy  stories,  and  romped 
with  them.  Outwardly  he  seemed  a  not  too  suc- 
cessful but  cheery  and  likable  clerk  and  literary 
hack.  This  stay  at  the  Bradlaughs'  proved  one 
of  the  happiest  periods  in  his  life,  yet  there  is 

[  59  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

always  the  shadow  of  the  old  melancholy  and  the 
unforgettable  sorrow  mingled  with  it. 

It  was  unfortunate  for  Thomson  that  his  poetry 
should  appear  so  exclusively  in  the  National 
Reformer.  Bradlaugh's  paper  seemed  far  from 
respectable  to  the  upper  classes  of  Mid-Victorian 
society,  and  was  for  the  most  part  read  by  labor- 
ing men.  Consequently  Bradlaugh's  own  articles, 
written  in  a  fine,  slashing,  controversial  style,  quite 
obscured  the  poems  by  his  friend,  B.  V.,  which 
from  time  to  time  were  included  with  them. 
Thomson  himself  was  too  much  the  poet  and 
dreamer,  and  too  little  the  cocksure,  assertive 
reformer,  to  do  popular  poetry  or  prose  for  such 
an  audience.     Says  Mr.  Salt  of  his  position: 

"His  part,  however,  was  more  that  of  a 
free-lance  than  that  of  a  recognized  leader; 
for  his  intense  individuality,  coupled  with  his 
almost  cynical  disbelief  in  the  possibility  of 
any  human  progress,  must  always  have  pre- 
vented his  giving  himself  heart  and  soul  to 
a  'cause.'  He  worked,  as  he  himself  avowed, 
on  the  side  of  liberty  and  free  thought,  not 
because  he  believed  in  the  ultimate  triumph 
of  these  principles,  but  simply  because  he  was 
prompted  thereto  by  a  natural  instinct  and 
inclination.  His  hatred  of  all  fuss  and  sham, 
and  his  impatience  of  the  occasional  'clap- 
trap'  and  false  sentiment  not  wholly  sepa- 

[  60  ] 


HACKWORK  IN  LONDON 

rable  from  any  popular  movement,  made  him 
at  times  a  sarcastic  critic  of  his  own  party 
no  less  than  of  his  adversaries." 

Yet  the  poet  would  have  found  it  almost  impos- 
sible to  publish  his  fearless  and  fiery  verses  else- 
where. "For  me,"  Thomson  once  remarked  in  a 
letter  in  reference  to  the  National  Reformer,  "its 
supreme  merit  consists  in  the  fact  that  I  can  say 
in  it  what  I  like  how  I  like;  and  I  know  not 
another  periodical  in  Britain  which  would  grant 
me  the  same  liberty  or  license."  With  Brad- 
laugh  he  had  the  most  cordial  relations,  in  spite 
of  the  fact  that  the  reformer  never  seemed  to 
realize  the  greatness  of  the  poet,  while  the  poet 
was  not  always  backward  in  jeering  at  the  extrav- 
agances of  the  reformer. 

Like  most  men  who  take  to  hack-writing  for 
their  living,  Thomson  became  radical  in  his  politi- 
cal views.  To  this  end  Bradlaugh  also  influenced 
him  considerably.  This  trend  in  the  poet's  inter- 
ests is  seen  in  two  poems,  the  Polish  Insurgent  and 
Garibaldi  Revisiting  England,  written  during  his 
stay  at  the  Bradlaughs',  and  while  the  poet  him- 
self was  secretary  to  the  Polish  Committee  in 
London.  The  former  is  a  Browningesque  and 
quite  impersonal  study  of  the  recklessly  brave 
Pole  who  leaves  England,  which  he  calls  "Smith- 
land,"  to  fight  the  hopeless  fight  for  his  country. 
In  his  poem  on  Garibaldi,  Thomson  shows  that 

[  61  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

love  of  Italy  which  he  had  perhaps  caught  from 
Shelley  and  Browning,  and  apostrophises  her  as 

"Enceladus  Italy,  risen 

With  earthquake,  but  pausing  distrest 
The  left  arm  still  brutally  fettered 
And  Peter's  rock  crushing  the  breast." 

This  sort  of  political  verse  now  became  a  habit 
with  Thomson  which  lasted  till  his  death.  Since 
they  owed  their  production  to  the  fact  that  he  had 
become  a  hack-writer  on  current  topics,  they  are 
consequently  fine  only  in  parts. 

Between  1862  and  1866  Thomson  wrote  much 
prose.  Some  of  it,  such  as  Bumble,  Bumbledom, 
Bumblism,  an  echo  of  Arnold's  contemporary  on- 
slaught on  the  Philistines,  closely  resembles  the 
political  poems  already  mentioned.  Yet  the  Lady 
of  Sorrow,  the  prose  counterpart  to  the  City,  was 
also  written  during  these  years.  Its  sonorous 
periods,  done  in  the  imaginative  style  of  De 
Quincey,  cloak  his  old  sorrow  for  Matilda  Weller. 
Its  three  parts,  the  "Angel,"  the  "Siren,"  and  the 
"Shadow,"  reveal  the  supreme  happiness  he  felt 
in  her  love,  the  dangerous  temptations  of  life,  and 
her  abiding  influence  upon  him  which  makes  him 
dubious  and  melancholy  in  his  later  years.  How- 
ever intense  his  rekindled  affection  for  Helen 
Gray,  it  had  quite  burned  out  by  now,  and  his 
first  grief  still  possessed  him. 

[  62  ] 


HACKWORK  IN  LONDON 

Thomson  wrote  few  poems  between  his  com- 
ing to  London  and  1865.  The  Three  that  shall 
be  One  is  an  allegory  of  Love,  who  is  betrothed 
to  Death,  yet  seduced  by  Life  and  left  on  earth  to 
comfort  him.  The  tense  and  simple  mysticism  of 
this  poem  is  quite  rare  in  Thomson's  poetry: 

"Faint  on  the  ground  she  lay; 
Love  kissed  the  swoon  away; 
Death  then  bent  over  her, 
Death  the  sweet  comforter! 
Whispered  with  tearful  smile 
'Wait  but  a  little  while, 
Then  I  will  come  to  thee; 
We  are  one  family.'  " 

Ronald  and  Helen,  like  the  earlier  Tasso  to 
Leonora  or  Bertram  to  Geraldine,  is  an  overlong 
love  lament  addressed  to  a  dead  mistress.  Yet 
the  form  is  new.  Unlike  his  uniformly  stanzaic 
poems  of  the  fifties,  this  is  a  lyric  medley  much 
like  Tennyson's  Maud.  Thomson  was  shortly  to 
make  more  effective  use  of  this  medley  form  than 
in  Ronald  and  Helen,  which  is  uneven,  confused 
and  rather  dull.  But  The  Fire  that  filled  my 
heart  of  old,  written  about  the  same  time,  is  one 
of  his  richest  and  most  vibrantly  emotional  lyrics, 
while  Vane's  Story  (1864)  is  the  most  notable 
poem  composed  during  his  stay  at  the  Brad- 
laughs'. 

After  Thomson  left  the  army  school  and  took 

[  63  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

up  writing  in  London,  much  conventionality  in 
thought  and  style  departed  from  his  verse,  and 
the  present  poem  is  less  florid  and  ornate  than  his 
earlier  work.  Vane's  Story  is  an  account  of  the 
poet's  vision  of  his  lost  love,  Matilda,  told  in  the 
imaginative  and  fantastically  irregular  manner  of 
Browning's  Christmas  Eve  and  Easter  Day.  The 
poet  dreams  that  he  is  visited  by  "Her,  the  Rose 
of  Heaven,"  somewhat  as  before  in  the  Deliverer. 
She  chides  him  for  failing  to  gain  fame  as  a  poet, 
and  grieves  over  his  doubts  of  a  future  life.  The 
poem  is  a  curious  mixture  of  supernatural  and 
commonplace  realism,  of  spirituality  and  impu- 
dent sneers  at  religion,  of  nervous  comic  mockery 
and  the  sincere  confessions  of  a  victim  of  insom- 
nia and  melancholia.  Some  critics  have  objected 
to  this  blending  of  seriousness  and  mockery,  as 
they  have  to  that  in  Browning's  more  famous 
poems.  Not  a  few  have  been  shocked  and 
offended  at  the  poet's  flippant  religious  specula- 
tions, and  at  the  Heaven  which  he  terms  a  "bland 
Beau  monde."  In  this  respect,  indeed,  the  iron 
of  Calvinism  had  entered  his  soul,  and  when  he 
reacted,  he  did  so  fearlessly  and  without  com- 
promise: 

"Then  I  give  God  my  scorn  and  hate, 
And  turning  back  from  Heaven's  gate 
(Suppose  me  got  there!)  bow,  Adieu! 
Almighty  Devil,  damn  me  too!" 

[  64  ] 


HACKWORK  IN  LONDON 

The  Mid-Victorians  were  not  noted  for  their 
nice  perception  of  the  ridiculous,  especially  in 
matters  of  Christian  belief.  Their  feeling  toward 
such  thrusts  as  this  can  easily  be  imagined.  Yet 
Vane's  Story,  apart  from  its  close  autobiographi- 
cal truth,  contains  some  passages  of  an  almost 
Shelleyan  melody: 

"There  was  a  Fountain  long  ago, 
A  fountain  of  perpetual  flow, 
Whose  purest  springlets  had  their  birth 
Deep  in  the  bosom  of  the  earth. 
Its  joyous  wavering  silvery  shaft 
To  all  the  beams  of  morning  laughed, 
Its  steadfast  murmurous  crystal  column 
Was  loved  by  all  the  moonbeams  solemn; 
From  morn  to  eve  it  fell  again 
A  singing  many-jeweled  rain, 
From  eve  to  morn  it  charmed  the  hours 
With  whispering  dew  and  diamond  show- 
ers; 
Crowned  many  a  day  with  sunbows  bright, 
With  moonbeams  halo'd  many  a  night; 
And  so  kept  full  its  marble  urn, 
All  fringed  with  fronds  of  greenest  fern, 
O'er  which  with  timeless  love  intent 
A  pure  white  marble  goddess  leant:" 

Despite  its  carelessness  of  diction,  its  indifference 
to   all   the   established   literary   canons,    and   the 

[  65  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

levity  of  the  theological  footnotes  scattered 
through  it,  Vane's  Story  is  one  of  the  half  dozen 
greatest  poems  Thomson  ever  wrote. 

The  year  1865,  the  last  that  Thomson  spent 
with  the  Bradlaughs',  marks  the  high  point  of 
cheerfulness  in  his  poetry.  The  poet's  consider- 
able sense  of  humor  temporarily  allowed  him  to 
enjoy  those  incongruities  in  life  which  tortured 
him  so  greatly  during  his  darker  hours.  In  a 
short  poem,  Art,  Thomson  utters  a  rather  cyni- 
cal conclusion  concerning  the  relation  of  art  to 
life: 

"Singing  is  sweet;  but  be  sure  of  this, 
Lips  only  sing  when  they  cannot  kiss. 

"Had  she  let  his  arm  steal  round  her  waist 
Would  the  lovely  portrait  yet  be  traced? 

"Since  he  could  not  embrace  it  flushed  and 
warm 
He  has  carved  in  stone  the  perfect  form. 

"Who  gives  the  fine  report  of  the  feast? 
He  who  got  none  and  enjoyed  it  least." 

While  Thomson  realized  that  in  his  poetry  he 
had  always  open  an  escape  from  the  burdens  of 
life  which  were  sometimes  almost  unsupportable, 
yet  he  had  no  illusions  about  art  for  art's  sake. 
This  poem  was  an  especial  favorite  with  George 

[  66  ] 


HACKWORK  IN  LONDON 

Meredith,  as  that  poet  and  novelist  declared  in 
a  very  cordial  letter  to  Thomson. 

But  the  best  poem  of  this  year,  Sunday  up  the 
River,  is  the  most  light-hearted  work  he  ever  pro- 
duced, and  eventually  attracted  the  attention  of 
Froude  and  Kingsley.  Like  Ronald  •and  Helen,  it 
is  a  lyric  medley  which  narrates  a  rambling  story 
of  holiday  love  up  the  Thames.  There  is  a  keen 
good  humor  in  the  poet's  enthusiastic  assertion 
that 

"I  love  all  hearty  exercise 

That  makes  one  strain  and  quiver, 
And  best  of  all  I  love  and  prize 
This  boating  on  the  river." 

which    is   shortly    followed   by   the   very   human 
reflection, 

"How  sinful  any  work  to  do 
In  this  Italian  weather" 

and  finally  the  confession  that 

"Our  skiff  beneath  the  willow  lies 
Half  stranded  and  half  floating." 

After  his  description  of  the  beauties  of  nature, 

"The  sky  was  pale  with  fervor, 
The  distant  trees  were  grey, 
The  hill-lines  drawn  like  waves  of  dawn 
Dissolving  in  the  day," 

[  67  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

his  ironical  amusement  at  the  holiday  maker's 
outrageous  plebeian  appearance  is  equally  delight- 
ful, 

"My  shirt  is  of  the  soft  red  wool, 
My  cap  is  azure  braided 
By  two  white  hands  so  beautiful 
My  tie  mauve-purple  shaded." 

In  a  concluding  passage  which  has  been  moral- 
ized over  vastly  too  much,  the  hero  produces  a 
"pocket-pistol"  of  "Jameson's  Irish  Whiskey," 
and  the  poem  ends  with  a  genial  and  happy- 
hearted  panegyric  of  life  and  love.  There  is  no 
clearer  example  in  all  Thomson's  poetry  of  his 
whimsical  and  charming  good  fellowship  than 
here. 

In  an  equally  cheerful  vein,  though  less  sus- 
tained in  lyrical  power,  is  its  sister  medley,  Sun- 
day at  Hampstead  (an  idle  idyll  by  a  very 
humble  member  of  the  great  and  noble  London 
mob).  Thomson  is  not  at  all  ashamed  of  his 
Bohemianism,  yet  he  is  rarely  over-ostentatious 
about  it.  In  the  pursuits  of  the  vulgar  he  takes 
a  huge  relish : 

"We  can  laugh  out  loud  when  merry, 
We  can  romp  at  kiss-in-the-ring, 
We  can  take  our  beer  at  a  public, 
We  can  loll  on  the  grass  and  sing. 


[  68  ] 


HACKWORK  IN  LONDON 

"Mary  and  Dick  so  grandly 
Parade  suburban  streets; 
His  waistcoat  and  her  bonnet 
Proving  the  best  of  treats. 

"Mary  is  going  to  chapel 
And  what  takes  her  there,  do  you  guess? 
Her  sweet  little  duck  of  a  bonnet 
And  her  new  second-hand  silk  dress." 

Yet  along  with  the  realistic  good  humor,  there  are 
here,  as  in  Sunday  up  the  River,  rapturous  and 
beautiful  love  lyrics: 

"Day  after  day  of  this  azure  May 
The  blood  of  the  Spring  has  swelled  in  my 

veins, 
Night  after  night  of  broad  moonlight 
A  mystical  dream  has  dazzled  my  brains." 

Thomson  himself  is,  of  course,  "Lazy,"  the  hero 
of  the  poem,  and  laughs  heartily  at  himself.  On 
the  whole,  these  two  gay  and  good-humored 
poems  have  a  sweetness,  richness  and  simplicity 
about  them  almost  unique  among  Victorian  poetry 
of  the  medley  type,  yet  they  are  not  at  all  alien  to 
the  temperament  of  the  author  of  the  City  of 
Dreadful  Night.  As  that  is  the  consummate 
expression  of  the  dark  side  of  his  life,  so  they 
are  the  fullest  expression  of  his  sunnier  moments. 
No  optimist  could  be  so  rapturous  had  he  not  also 

[  69  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

known  the  pangs  of  sorrow,  nor  could  a  pessimist 
who  was  not  also  partially  an  idealist  be  so  vividly 
and  poignantly  despairing.  Here  the  scale  in- 
clines to  cheerfulness  and  love,  yet  shortly  we 
shall  see  it  sink  to  the  "confirmation  of  the  old 
despair."  The  minor  poems  of  this  year,  Shame- 
less, a  scene  in  Kew,  and  Low  Life,  a  dialogue 
between  two  lovers  in  a  train,  are  cheerful  and 
obviously  inspired  by  Browning.  Polycrates  on 
Waterloo  Bridge  is  a  rather  amusing  hack-satire. 
In  1866  Thomson  left  the  Bradlaugh  home  in 
Tottenham  to  live  as  a  "single  man"  lodger,  as 
Mr.  Dobell  puts  it,  for  the  rest  of  his  life.  He 
still  remained  on  intimate  and  even  affectionate 
terms  with  the  Bradlaughs,  however,  and  most  of 
the  scanty  knowledge  we  have  of  his  whereabouts 
and  occupations  are  derived  from  letters  subse- 
quently written  to  Hypatia  or  Alice  Bradlaugh. 
The  change  was  in  every  way  unfortunate  for  the 
poet,  as  it  secluded  him  from  cheerful  company, 
and  aggravated  his  melancholia  by  the  solitude 
which  it  imposed.  In  Philosophy,  written  about 
this  time,  the  poet  invokes  the  beautiful  shams  of 
life,  and  resolves  not  to  probe  too  curiously  into 
the  truth : 

"If  Midge  will  pine  and  curse  its  hours  away 
Because  Midge  is  not  Everything  For-aye, 
Poor  Midge  thus  loses  its  one  summer  day, 
Loses  its  all — and  winneth  what,  I  pray?" 

[  70  ] 


HACKWORK  IN  LONDON 

In  Life's  Hebe  he  is  more  resolute,  though  less 
subtle.  This  poem  is  an  allegory  of  life.  Hebe 
offers  her  cup  to  all  men  in  youth,  but  none  will 
take  it  as  she  gives  it.  Yet  if  its  contents  are 
diluted  with  wine  or  honey  they  become  poisonous. 
The  natural  man  escapes  by  mixing  them  with 
water.  Only  the  poet  drinks  the  contents  un- 
mixed, and  it  is  found  that  he  returns  the  cup 
fuller  than  when  he  received  it.  The  moral  is, 
that  if  one  is  to  enjoy  life,  he  must  embrace  it 
boldly  and  without  hesitation. 

Thomson's  next  significant  poem,  L'ancien 
Regime,  was  written  in  1867.  Again  we  see  his 
radical  political  tendencies,  for  he  vigorously 
satirizes  the  monarchical  government  of  Eng- 
land. His  views  are  presented  even  more  clearly 
in  his  prose  essay,  Proposals  for  the  Speedy 
Extinction  of  Evil  and  Misery,  which  about  this 
time  was  inspired  by  Swift  and  written  with  a 
certain  amount  of  his  power.  Thomson,  unlike 
his  beloved  Shelley,  did  not  believe  in  the  perfecta- 
bility  of  mankind.  Toward  almost  all  philan- 
thropic ventures  he  was  gloomy  and  sceptical.  He 
thought  that  "all  proselytism  is  useless  and  ab- 
surd." In  Indolence — a  Moral  Essay  he  declares 
that,  "In  our  time  and  country  we  have  a  plague 
of  busy-bodyism,  certainly  more  annoying  and 
perhaps  more  noxious  than  the  plague  of  idleness. 
One  comes  across  many  earnest  and  energetic 
characters  who   are  no  longer  men,   but   simply 

[  71  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

machines  for  working  out  their  missions."  The 
wonder  of  it  was  that  Thomson  could,  with  such 
views  as  these,  continue  to  hold  the  friendship  of 
the  fiery  and  uncompromising  Bradlaugh. 

From  what  can  be  learned  of  the  poet's  life  at 
this  time,  it  seems  that  he  was  too  busy  to  write 
much  poetry,  and  did  only  hack  prose  articles  on 
political  topics.  The  Naked  Goddess  of  1867  is, 
however,  a  significant  poem.  It  is  an  allegorical 
story  of  the  untameable  Goddess  of  Nature, 
whom  the  city-folk  vainly  attempt  to  cloak  in 
robes  of  piety  or  science.  She  refuses  to  conform 
to  the  laws  of  the  arch-priest  or  the  sage,  and 
bestows  her  blessing  only  on  the  little  children 
who  can  understand  her  and  are  willing  to  follow 
her.  The  Two  Lovers  swiftly  and  vigorously 
narrates  an  Oriental  tale  of  love  and  the  mockery 
of  Fate.  But  Thomson's  greatest  poem  since 
Sunday  up  the  River  is  the  powerful  and  very 
original  In  the  Room,  one  of  the  greatest  poems 
he  ever  wrote.  Thomson  had  now  been  in  soli- 
tary lodgings  in  Pimlico  for  two  years,  first  in 
Denbigh  Street  and  then  in  what  is  now  Warwick 
Street.  A  few  years  before  he  had  written  feel- 
ingly of  William  Blake: 

"There   were   thousands   and   thousands   of 
human  kind 
In  this  desert  of  brick  and  stone; 
But  some  were  deaf  and  some  were  blind 
And  he  was  there  alone." 

[  72  ] 


HACKWORK  IN  LONDON 

/;/  the  Room  concentrates  all  the  loneliness  of 
a  great  city  within  a  single  dingy  lodging-room. 
This  room  had  once  been  glorified  by  love,  but 
its  beautiful  mistress  had  departed,  and  its  pres- 
ent master  grown  morose,  has  committed  suicide 
and  is  lying  dead  on  the  bed.  In  turn  the  furni- 
ture in  the  room  tells  the  story  of  his  increasing 
despair,  his  silent  hours  of  morbid  brooding,  and 
his  eventual  death  by  poison: 

"It  lay,  the  lowest  thing  there,  lulled 
Sweet-sleep-like  in  corruption's  truce; 
The  form  whose  purpose  was  annulled, 

While  all  the  other  shapes  meant  use. 
It  lay,  the  he  become  now  it, 

Unconscious  of  the  deep  disgrace, 
Unanxious  how  its  parts  might  flit 

Through  what  new   forms  in  time   and 
space. 

"It  lay  and  preached,  as  dumb  things  do, 

More  powerfully  than  tongues  can  prate; 
Though  life  be  torture  through  and  through, 

Man  is  but  weak,  to  plain  of  fate : 
The  drear  path  crawls  on  drearier  still 

To  wounded  feet  and  hopeless  breast? 
Well,  he  can  lie  down  when  he  will, 

And  straight  all  ends  in  endless  rest. 

[  73  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

"And  while  the  black  night  nothing  saw, 

And  till  the  cold  moon  came  at  last, 
The  old  bed  held  the  room  in  awe 

With  tales  of  its  experience  vast. 
It  thrilled  the  gloom;  it  told  such  tales 

Of  human  sorrows  and  delights, 
Of  fever  moans  and  infant  wails, 

Of  births  and  deaths  and  bridal  nights." 

When  it  is  realized  how  personal  a  poet  Thom- 
son was,  whether  gay  or  sad,  the  reader  can  de- 
tect here  the  outcome  of  many  bitter  and  lonely 
hours  of  despair,  when  suicide  seemed  to  him  a 
tempting  escape.  His  old  melancholy  is  again 
upon  him,  and  he  is  one  step  nearer  to  the  City, 
his  masterpiece  of  despair.  In  fact,  only  one 
poem  of  note  intervenes  between  the  two,  and  that 
is  Weddah  and  Om-el-Bonain.  Weddah,  written 
in  1868-69,  is  an  Oriental  love  story  in  ottova 
rima,  swiftly  and  powerfuly  told.  Unlike  the 
ornate  and  melodiously  digressive  Pot  of  Basil, 
whose  manner  it  nevertheless  recalls,  Weddah 
possesses  a  naked  strength  which  Keats  rarely  if 
ever  was  master  of.  Weddah  is  the  story  of  two 
lovers  who  are  crushed  by  an  omnipresent  and 
all-powerful  Fate.  The  whole  poem  has  what 
Swinburne,  who  together  with  the  Rossetti  broth- 
ers greatly  admired  it,  called  a  "forthright  tri- 
umphant power,"  which  Thomson  had  rarely 
revealed  in  his  previous  poems,  and  which  we  are 

[  74  ] 


HACKWORK  IN  LONDON 

destined  to  mark  again  in  the  City  of  Dreadful 
Night.  Yet  it  was  a  characteristic  bit  of  bad 
fortune  that  the  poem  was  refused  for  Fraser's 
Magazine  and  left  unprinted  until  the  poet's 
second  volume  was  collected. 

The  chief  source  of  information  concerning 
Thomson  during  this  period  of  his  life  is  his 
diary,  which,  despite  his  Bohemian  habits,  he  regu- 
larly kept.  Its  most  significant  entry  is  for 
Sunday,  November  4,  1869: 

"Burned  all  my  old  papers,  manuscripts 
and  letters,  save  the  book  MSS.  which  have 
been  already  in  great  part  printed.     It  took 
me  five  hours  to  burn  them,  guarding  against 
chimney    on    fire,    and   keeping   them    thor- 
oughly  burning.      I   was   sad   and   stupid — 
scarcely  looked  into  any;  had  I  begun  read- 
ing them  I  might  never  have  finished  their 
destruction.    All  the  letters ;  those  I  had  kept 
for  more  than  for  twenty  years;  those  I  had 
kept  for  sixteen.     I  felt  myself  like  one  who, 
having   climbed    half-way   up    a    long    rope 
(thirty  five  on  the  23rd  inst.)    cuts  off   all 
beneath  his  feet;  he  must  climb  on  and  can 
never  touch  the  old  earth  again  without  a 
fatal  fall.     The  memories  treasured  in  the 
letters  can  never,  at  least  in  great  part,  be 
revived  in  my  life  again,  nor  in  the  lives  of 
the  friends  yet  living  who  wrote  them.     But 

[  75  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

after  this  terrible  year  I  could  do  no  less 
than  consume  the  past.  I  can  now  better 
face  the  future,  come  in  what  guise  it  may." 

What  poems  and  what  letters  were  destroyed 
in  this  fire  can  never  be  determined,  and  their  loss 
must  be  regretted  both  by  the  poet's  biographers 
and  readers.  Like  many  other  poets  of  marked 
personality,  Thomson  is  most  himself  in  a  minor 
poem.  It  is  by  no  means  impossible  that  the 
destruction  extended  to  some  poems  of  impor- 
tance, as  Thomson  hardly  glanced  at  what  he 
burned.  It  is  a  plausible  conjecture  that  among 
his  letters  were  some  written  by  Matilda,  sixteen 
years  before,  as  he  differentiates  between  the 
letters  kept  for  sixteen  years,  and  those  which  he 
had  received  before  1853,  the  date  of  her  death. 
The  mood  of  gloomy  and  hopeless  persistence  is, 
however,  increasingly  characteristic  both  in  his 
life  and  his  writings.  As  a  poet,  he  had  served 
his  apprenticeship;  as  a  man,  he  had  burned  his 
bridges,  and  had  come  to  living  within  the  fading 
memories  and  dreams  of  his  youth  more  and  more 
completely. 


[  76  ] 


CHAPTER  V 
TRAVELS  AND  THE  CITY  (i 870-1 874) 

FOR  the  next  four  years  of  his  life,  Thomson 
devoted  only  a  small  portion  of  his  time  to 
literature,  and  was  chiefly  concerned  with  various 
mercantile  and  journalistic  ventures,  all  of  which 
failed  with  a  unanimous  promptness  and  com- 
pleteness. Yet  it  was  in  the  spare  hours  of  these 
harassing  years  that  the  City  of  Dreadful  Night 
grew  gradually  in  his  mind  and  on  paper  into  its 
superbly  powerful  form.  Roughly  speaking,  the. 
first  half  of  it  was  finished  in  1870;  the  remain- 
ing portion  after  two  years  more  of  disappoint- 
ment and  melancholia  in  dingy  London  offices  and 
lodgings.  Like  practically  all  his  other  poems,  it 
is  sincere  and  intensely  personal,  and  until  the 
background  of  his  actual  life  during  the  period  of 
its  composition  is  realized,  its  merits  cannot  be 
fully  appreciated. 

Bradlaugh  gave  up  business  in  London  in  1870 
or  1 87 1,  as  Thomson  says  in  a  letter  of  1872, 

"in  order  to  devote  himself  solely  to  the 
great  business  of  illuminating  the  benighted 
intellect  of  the  nation  in  social,  political  and 

[  77  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

religious  matters.  For  some  time  after  he 
left  I  did  nothing,  an  occupation  which  would 
suit  me  extremely  well,  and  for  which  I  have 
fine  natural  talents  that  I  have  taken  care  to 
cultivate  to  the  best  of  my  abilities.  That  is, 
would  suit  me  extremely  well  on  a  fortune,  or 
in  a  semi-tropical  climate;  but  here,  without 
money,  it  is  a  luxury  too  ethereal  for  my 
taste.  Afterwards,  I  did  some  work  in  a 
printing  office,  reading  proofs,  revising,  etc.; 
and,  as  to  this,  I  will  only  say  that  if  ever 
you  have  the  misfortune  to  be  condemned  to 
penal  servitude,  and  they  offer  to  commute 
the  sentence  for  such  work  in  a  printing  office, 
you  had  better  stick  to  the  penal  servitude.  I 
then  became  secretary  pro  tern,  to  one  of  the 
thousand  companies  which  came  into  being 
last  year,  and  in  some  very  hard  commercial 
campaigning  have  already  had  two  com- 
panies killed  under  me.  I  am  at  present 
astride  of  a  third,  which  may  carry  me  out 
safely  or  may  not;  it  has  received  two  or 
three  shot  and  sabre  wounds  already,  but 
seems  tough  and  tenacious  of  life.  By-the- 
bye,  our  slain  companies  brought  nobody 
down  but  the  riders;  our  friendly  foes,  the 
share-holding  public,  having  received  all  their 
money  back.  As  I  was  nearly  thirty  when  I 
came  to  London,  I  could  not  go  through  the 
regular  course  in  any  business,  and  have  had 

[  78  ] 


TRAVELS  AND  "THE  CITY" 

to    seize    whatever    honest    chance    offered. 
Perhaps  some  day  I  shall  turn  up  a  trump 
and  win  a  good  stake;  it  is  much  more  prob- 
able that  I  shan't.    In  the  meanwhile,  having 
no  one  to  look  to  but  myself,  I  quietly  take 
things  as  they  come,  and  quietly  let  things 
go  as  they  go,   fortifying  myself  with  that 
saying  of  the  philosopher  that  it  matters  not 
whether  in  this  vale  of  tears  we  wipe  our 
eyes  with  a  silk  or  a  cotton  handkerchief,  or 
blink  through  tortoise-shell  or  gold-rimmed 
eye-glasses.      Perhaps  the   said  philosopher 
had  himself  the  silk  handkerchief  and  the 
gold-rimmed  glasses,  or  perhaps  he  did  not 
use  a  handkerchief  or  wear  eye-glasses,  and 
thus  was  able  to  be  so  philosophical  on  the 
subject.    Not  that  I  need  to  wipe  my  eyes  in 
this  vale  of  tears,  for  I  always  find  the  pros- 
pect much  too  sad  or  much  too  comical  for 
weeping." 

Thomson's  various  secretaryships,  here  so  dis- 
mally yet  good-temperedly  referred  to,  were  des- 
tined to  cause  him  to  cross  the  Atlantic.  In  the 
year  1872,  when  the  above  letter  was  written,  he 
happened  to  be  secretary  of  "The  Champion  Gold 
and  Silver  Mines  Company,"  whose  holdings  were 
mostly  in  Central  City,  Colorado.  Thither  he 
was  soon  sent  at  the  instigation  of  the  directors 
of  the  company,  to  report  to  them  upon  the  work 

[  79  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

which  was  being  accomplished  there,  and  to  rep- 
resent them  upon  the  grounds.  His  account  of 
the  people  and  their  customs,  preserved  in  various 
letters  to  his  friends,  reminds  the  reader  oddly  of 
Mark  Twain's  "Roughing  It"  in  its  exaggerated 
and  explosive  humor. 

"As  to  the  drinking,"  Thomson  wrote  to  a 
friend,  "one  anecdote  will  suffice.  An  officer 
sent  out  to  cater  for  some  divisions  of  the 
Army  in  the  West,  returned  with  six  waggon- 
loads  of  whiskey  and  one  of  provisions.  The 
commanding  officer,  having  overhauled  the 
stock,  cried  out,  'What  the  hell  shall  we  do 
with  all  these  provisions?'  " 

Thomson  too  was  struck  with  the  vastness  and 
the  undeveloped  resources  of  America,  and  for- 
gave the  Americans  much  of  their  arrogance 
when  he  realized  the  tremendous  causes  of  their 
sometimes  vulgar  enthusiasms.  Himself  a  radi- 
cal in  politics,  he  could  appreciate  more  com- 
pletely than  the  typical  English  tourist,  our  inter- 
nal "manifest  destiny,"  and  the  fact  that,  as  he 
put  it, 

"they  are  starting  over  here  with  all  our 
experience  and  culture  at  their  command, 
without  any  of  the  obsolete  burdens  and  im- 
pediments which  in  the  course  of  a  thousand 
years    have    become    inseparable    from    our 

[  80  ] 


TRAVELS  AND      THE  CITY 

institutions,  and  with  a  country  which  will 
want  more  labor  and  more  people  for  many 
generations  to  come." 

Thomson  was  likewise  impressed  with  the  wild 
Colorado  mountain  scenery  during  his  eight 
months'  stay  at  the  mines,  and  in  his  later  poems 
the  reader  can  detect  images  remembered  from 
his  life  in  the  West.  His  previous  knowledge  of 
nature  had  been  gained  for  the  most  part  in  the 
lowlands  of  Ireland  and  southern  England.  Cer- 
tain passages  of  the  City  written  at  this  time  per- 
haps, indicate  the  effect  of  the  grandeur  and  vast- 
ness  of  the  New  World,  as, 

"A  trackless  wilderness  rolls  north  and 
west, 

Savannahs,  savage  woods,  enormous  moun- 
tains, 

Bleak  uplands,  black  ravines  with  torrent 
fountains.    ..." 

Thus  it  came  about  that  the  City  in  its  imagery 
was  London,  fringed  with  Colorado  and  seen  at 
midnight.  In  his  letters  he  had  much  to  say  of 
American  scenery: 

"This  week  we  are  to  have  a  concert  (in 
Central  City),  and  also  a  lecture  on  the 
Darwinian  Theory,  admission  one  dollar. 
We  have   a   theatre,   and  now   and  then   a 

[  81  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

dance.  The  old,  rough  days  with  their  perils 
and  excitements,  are  quite  over;  the  'City' 
is  civilized  enough  to  be  dull  and  common- 
place, while  not  civilized  enough  to  be  soci- 
able and  pleasant.  There  are  no  beggars, 
and  petty  larceny  is  almost  unknown;  store 
keepers  extort  your  money  blandly  and 
quietly,  and  the  large  larceny  of  selling 
mines  at  preposterous  prices  makes  the  peo- 
ple despise  all  larceny  that  is  petty.   .    .    . 

"The  hills  surrounding  us  have  been 
flayed  of  their  grass  and  scalped  of  their 
timber,  and  they  are  scarred  and  gashed  and 
ulcerated  all  over  from  past  mining  opera- 
tions; so  ferociously  does  little  man  scratch 
at  the  breasts  of  his  great  calm  mother  when 
he  thinks  that  jewels  are  there  hidden.  .    .    . 

"These  foothills  are  distributed  remark- 
ably among  the  snowy  ranges  of  mountains, 
curtain  beyond  curtain,  fold  beyond  fold, 
twisting  and  heaving  inextricably  .  .  .  one 
massy  range  ends  in  a  promontory  whose 
scarped  and  precipitous  upper  flanks  gleam 
grand  and  savage,  in  their  stony  nakedness, 
like  the  gleaming  of  set  white  teeth  in  some 
swart  Titanic  barbarian.    .    .    . 

"From  these  higher  hills  one  gets  magnifi- 
cent views.  Vast  billowy  land  seas,  with 
dense  woods  and  deep  ravines  and  exquisitely 
emerald  dells,  whereon  and  whereover  sleep 

[  82  ] 


TRAVELS  AND  "THE  CITY 

and  sweep  immense  shadows,  and  of  all 
shades  even  at  noonday,  from  bright  green 
to  solid  black;  beyond,  a  crescent  of  the 
mountains,  some  with  broad  fields  or  deep 
furrows  of  snow,  some  sheathed  wholly  with 
this  white  splendor;  eastward  toward  the 
plains,  what  the  eye  cannot  distinguish  from 
a  distant  sea-line,  faint  or  dark  blue,  level  to 
the  horizon,  with  pale  streaks  like  the  shad- 
ows of  clouds  and  long  shoals,  and  the  haze 
of  evaporation. 

"...  I  have  seen  from  here  a  terrible 
storm  raging  over  the  plains,  dead-silent 
through  remoteness:  white  lightnings  mo- 
mentarily surging  up,  veiling  the  stars,  mak- 
ing the  lower  clouds  ghastly,  striking  pale 
reflections  from  clouds  at  the  zenith;  and 
these  broad  sheets  of  white  light  were 
seamed  and  riven  by  intense  darting  lines  of 
forked  lightning,  zig-zag,  vertical,  trans- 
verse, oblique." 

But  although  the  Colorado  scenery  improved 
his  poems,  the  financial  operations  of  its  whilom 
exploiters  did  not  benefit  his  pocket.  By  the  end 
of  1872  the  "Champion  Gold  and  Silver  Mines 
Co."  disappeared  in  that  hazy  oblivion  whither 
many  similar  ventures  have  both  preceded  and 
followed  it.  Thomson  returned  to  London  early 
in   1873,  and  for  six  months  his  pursuits  are  a 

[  83  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

mystery  to  his  biographers.  In  July,  1873, 
owing  to  the  efforts  of  his  faithful  friend,  Brad- 
laugh,  he  became  a  war  correspondent  of  the 
New  York  World  in  Spain,  where  the  Carlist 
revolutionary  movement  was  threatening  the  gov- 
ernment. The  ensuing  campaign,  however,  was 
greatly  disappointing  to  the  newspaper  world. 
The  whole  affair  proved  to  be  mainly  a  comic 
opera  of  alarms  and  excursions,  and  the  only 
skirmishing  Thomson  saw  was  "more  like  a  frolic 
of  schoolboys  than  a  serious  fight."  Owing  to 
the  grotesque  refusal  of  the  revolution  to  be 
spectacular,  to  a  short  attack  of  sunstroke,  and 
no  doubt  to  considerable  personal  indolence,  he 
failed  to  provide  sufficient  copy  for  the  World 
and  was  recalled  early  in  the  fall  of  '73,  despite 
his  just  rejoinder  that  it  was  hardly  his  fault  if 
the  Spaniards  refused  to  fight. 

Several  years  afterwards  Thomson  wrote  hu- 
morously of  the  trip  and  its  consequences.  When 
he  first  returned  to  London,  however,  there  is  no 
doubt  that  he  was  profoundly  discouraged.  More- 
over, the  sudden  return  from  a  tropical  summer  to 
a  damp  autumn  in  London  affected  his  health,  and 
for  weeks,  as  Mr.  Salt  tells  us,  he  could  not  read, 
write  or  even  smoke.  His  mind  consequently 
turned  back  upon  itself,  and  he  again  brooded 
over  his  continual  failures  against  Fate.  He  was 
now  nearing  forty,  and  had  no  future  to  which 
he  could  look  forward  beside  the  regular  routine 

[  84  ] 


TRAVELS  AND     THE  CITY 

of  hackwork.  His  health  and  ambitions  were 
declining,  all  his  attempts  in  business  had  failed, 
and  for  over  twenty  years  his  poems  and  prose 
had  been  very  poorly  paid,  and  practically  un- 
noticed. The  haunting  image  of  his  dead  love  of 
twenty  years  ago  tortured  his  mind  with  its 
increasing  suggestion  of  what  might  have  been, 
but  its  evanescent  beauty  could  no  longer  console 
him  in  his  dingy  and  monotonous  existence  in  Lon- 
don. Religion  had  grown  to  be  a  hideous  mock- 
ery and  an  impossible  delusion.  Neither  was  it 
good  that  he  should  be  rooming  alone  in  the 
unspeakable  solitude  of  a  great  city.  Before  his 
despairing  eyes,  London  rose  shadowy  through 
a  dense  and  fateful  gloom,  with  which  the  quaver- 
ing yellow  street-lamps  strove  in  vain;  a  vast 
metropolis,  whose  sombre  mansions  concealed 
unthinkable  wrongs  and  agonies  beneath  their 
shrouds  of  murky  air;  whose  dreary  streets  were 
paced  by  wandering,  hopeless  ghosts,  where 
groans  were  heard  continually,  and  the  muffled 
jar  of  unseen  wheels.  Over  all  hung  a  darkness 
which  never  was  on  land  or  sea.  In  scenes  luridly 
vivid,  like  midnight  lit  up  by  lightning  flashes, 
Thomson  has  described  this  "builded  desolation," 
even  to  the  "trackless  wilderness"  or  "savannahs" 
and  "savage  woods"  of  Hampstead,  where  ten 
years  before  he  had  found  such  rapturous  delight. 
Although  love  and  life  had  failed  him,  one  single 
consolation  remained — the  maturity  of  his  poetic 

[  85  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

powers.  The  result  is  the  City  of  Dreadful 
Night,  the  greatest  single  pessimistic  poem  in 
English,  or  perhaps  in  any  literature. 

Much  criticism  has  been  vapidly  expended  on 
the  structure  of  this  powerful  and  magnificent 
poem.  It  is  divided  into  twenty-one  sections, 
which  regularly  alternate  the  seven-line  reflective 
stanza  of  the  Guardian  Angel  and  the  Ladies  of 
Death,  and  varying  narrative  stanzas  of  three, 
four  and  six  lines.  In  the  latter  narrative  cantos, 
which  of  course  include  all  the  even  sections,  the 
poet's  wanderings  through  the  city  are  related, 
while  in  the  more  lyrical  and  massive  odd  cantos, 
he  reflects  upon  what  he  hears  and  sees  there. 
This  alternation  of  form  and  variation  of  lyrical 
and  narrative  treatment  relieves  what  would 
otherwise  be  a  tremendous  monotony  in  its  con- 
stant burden  of  despair. 

Here,  as  always,  Thomson  is  an  intensely  per- 
sonal poet,  and  it  is  because  of  this  fact  that  the 
City  is  a  great  poem.  To  an  intellectual  sceptic 
and  pessimist  like  Arnold,  even  his  own  person- 
ality seemed  to  him  too  petty  to  become  the  source 
of  a  dark  outlook  on  the  universe.  Arnold  could, 
despite  the  Greek  maxim  that  "Man  is  the  meas- 
ure of  all  things,"  disregard  the  limitations  of 
the  world  which  his  own  nature  compelled  him  to 
see,  and  view  the  universe  objectively  and  imper- 
sonally as  all  mankind  must  always  see  it.  But 
Thomson,    lacking    Arnold's    education    in    the 

[  86  ] 


TRAVELS  AND  "THE  CITY 

"grand  style"  of  Greek  poetry,  and  his  breadth 
of  outlook  as  an  Oxford  graduate  born  into  an 
intellectual  heritage,  felt  himself  a  pessimist  more 
on  account  of  his  own  sorrow  than  because  of  the 
inherent  sadness  of  the  universe.  Hence  the 
latter  poet  found  within  his  own  personality,  in 
his  own  hopes  and  fears,  his  dreams  and  disillu- 
sionments,  the  inspiration  for  this  greatest  of  his 
poems. 

In  the  Proem  to  the  City  he  declares  that  he 
has  no  wish  to  disturb  the  happiness  of  others, 
but  that  at  times  "a  cold  rage  seizes  him"  to  show 
Truth  in  all  her  ancient  ugliness.  Much  akin  to 
Tennyson's  "sad,  mechanic  exercise  Like  dull 
narcotics,  numbing  pain,"  is  his  confession  of  his 
satisfaction  in  writing  poetry: 

"Because  it  gives  some  sense  of  power  and 
passion 
In  helpless  impotence  to  try  to  fashion 
Our  woe  in  living  words,  howe'er  uncouth." 

Thomson  realized  better  than  any  of  his  critics 
that  his  city  is  built  in  a  sleepless  nightmare,  and 
that  in  the  clear  daylight  it  "dissolveth  like  a 
dream  of  night  away."  Yet  he  declares  that  if 
such  a  dream  returns  night  after  night,  and  year 
after  year,  it  cannot  be  distinguished  from  life 
itself,  which  is  composed  essentially  of  habitual 
dreams,  whose   reality  is  measured  only  by  the 

[  87  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

frequency  and  force  of  their  recurrence.  Hence, 
his  city  has  none  of  the  conventional  and  outworn 
imagery  of  the  ruined  city  beloved  of  romantic 
poets,  but  consists  of  orderly  streets  and  spacious 
mansions.  It  is  London  itself,  seen  in  a  moment 
of  despair,  and  described  with  a  lurid  force 
unequalled  since  Coleridge  and  De  Quincey. 

It    is    a    subjective    city,    confessedly,    but    su- 
premely real  to  Thomson.     Amid 

"The  soundless  solitudes  immense 
Of    ranged    mansions    dark    and    still    as 
tombs" 

there  are  other  inhabitants  too,  with  "worn  faces 
that  look  deaf  and  blind  Like  tragic  masks  of 
stone."  With  such  fiercely  vivid  Dantean  phrases 
he  paints  the  hopeless  woes  of  all  who  have 
entered  this  "citta  dolente."  All  the  sorrows  of 
humanity  are  found  here,  and  the  poet's  hand  at 
times  grows  a  little  weary  of  recording  them. 
First  he  meets  a  weary  pilgrim  who,  as  a  victim 
of  Fate,  can  only  bemoan  "Dead  Faith,  dead 
Love,  dead  Hope."  Faith  could  not  overcome 
the  graveyard,  Hope  perished  through  poverty 
and  bitter  adversity  in  a  hovel,  and  Love  died  in 
a  villa  through  sensuality,  bringing  false  suspi- 
cions and  murder  in  its  train.  Thomson  too  held 
that  "All  men  kill  the  thing  they  love."  A  second 
victim  of  Love  and  Fate  he  meets,  who  declaims 

[  88  ] 


TRAVELS  AND  'THE  CITY 

one  of  the  poet's  greatest  lyrics,  "As  I  came 
through  the  desert,  ..."  This  man,  who  is  of 
course  Thomson  himself,  had  lost  his  love  and 
his  hope,  and  consequently  feared  nothing,  even 
the  horrors  of  nature.  But  his  love  comes  to  him 
with  a  lamp  which  is  her  own  bleeding  heart.  She 
vainly  tries  to  wipe  his  brow  clear  of  anguish.  He 
feels  himself  two  separate  personalities,  one  his 
former  self  which  swoons  at  her  desolate  beauty, 
the  other  his  later  self  which  watches  it  passive, 
and  hopelessly  endures  without  a  sign  all  the  tor- 
tures which  Fate  can  inflict.  The  spectre  vanishes 
on 'the  tide  with  the  corpse  of  his  former  self,  his 
memories  of  love  long  years  ago,  while  the  other 
soulless  and  impotent  self  cries  out  with  the 
simplicity  of  the  Greek  tragedies, 

"They  love,  their  doom  is  drear, 
Yet  they  nor  hope  nor  fear; 
But  I,  what  do  I  here?" 

There  is  another  weird  scene  at  the  gate  of  the 
city,  where  all  the  weary  pilgrims  who  would 
enter  must  obey  Dante's  stern  mandate,  "Lasciate 
ogni  speranza,  voi  ch'entrate."  Some,  who  have 
no  hopes  to  abandon  at  the  gate,  are  denied  en- 
trance, and  suffer  in  a  torpid  Limbo  without. 
Inside  the  city,  ghosts  of  former  men  walk  the 
streets  in  despair.  The  poet  overhears  the  con- 
versation of  two   outworn   sufferers.     They  are 

[  89  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

atheists,  since  they  cannot  believe  in  the  fiendlike 
God  who  must  have  created  such  a  world.  To 
these  men,  religion  is  a  bitter  "rhapsody  of 
words" : 

"As  if  a  Being,  God  or  Fiend  could  reign, 
At  once  so  wicked,  foolish  and  insane, 
As  to  produce  men  when  he  could  refrain!" 

This  is  a  far  cry  from  the  Irvingites.  The  poet 
continues  in  harsh  and  powerful  stanzas: 

"The  world  rolls  round  for-ever  like  a  mill; 
It  grinds  out  death  and  life  and  good  and 

ill; 
It  has  no  purpose,  heart  or  mind  or  will. 

"While  air  of  Space  and  Time's  full  river 
flow, 
The  mill  must  blindly  whirl  unresting  so: 
It  may  be  wearing  out,  but  who  can  know? 

"Man  might  know  one  thing  were  his  sight 
less  dim; 
That  it  whirls  not  to  suit  his  petty  whim, 
That  it  is  quite  indifferent  to  him. 

"Nay,    does    it    treat    him    harshly    as    he 

saith? 
It  grinds   him   some   slow  years   of  bitter 

breath, 
Then  grinds  him  back  into  eternal  death." 

[  90  ] 


TRAVELS  AND  "THE  CITY 

The  next  narrative  episode  is  a  powerful  and 
pathetically  beautiful  tribute  to  his  lost  love.  In 
a  fine  mansion  a  lover  is  praying  beside  his  dead 
mistress: 

"The  chambers  of  the  mansion  of  my  heart, 
In  every  one  wherein  thine  image  dwells, 
Are  black  with  grief  eternal  for  thy  sake. 

"I  kneel  here  patient  as  thou  liest  there; 
As  patient  as  a  statue  carved  in  stone, 
Of  adoration  and  eternal  grief. 

***** 

"While  thou  dost  not  awake  I  cannot  move; 
And   something  tells   me   thou   wilt   never 

wake, 
And  I  alive  feel  turning  into  stone." 

As  the  poet  glides  silently  from  the  mansion,  he 
reflects  that, 

"This  was  the  festival  that  filled  with  light 
That  palace  in  the  City  of  the  Night." 

Then  the  poet  wanders  into  a  vast,  dark  cathe- 
dral, where  a  doom-stricken  congregation  listens 
to  the  despairing  sermon  delivered  in  a  "voice 
of  solemn  stress."  To  this  sombre  refuge  have 
all  manner  of  men  come,  the  defeated  reformer, 

[  91  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

the  victim  of  drugs,  the  professional  comedian, 
the  ecstatic  ascetic,  the  able  ruler,  the  evangelist, 
the  voluptuary,  the  artist  and  the  hero.  Nor  is 
there  any  joy  because  of  their  community  of  sor- 
row. All  stand  apart,  and  cannot  bridge  the 
chasms  between  self  and  self.  Doom,  and  not 
their  environment,  has  made  them  forever  sor- 
rowful. 

The  preacher  finds,  like  Tennyson  in  In  Memo- 
riam,  that  Evolution  is  a  bitter  thing  for  man- 
kind, which  has  no  "special  clause"  for  man,  but 
which  is  only  the  method  that  Fate  has  chosen 
to  impel  change  through  the  universe: 

"If  toads  and  vultures  are  obscene  to  sight, 
If  tigers  burn  with  beauty  and  with  might, 
Is  it  by  favor,  or  by  wrath  of  Fate? 

"All  substance  lives  and  struggles  evermore 
Through    countless    shapes    continually    at 
war, 
By  countless  interactions  interknit: 

"If  one  is  born  a  certain  day  on  earth, 
All  times  and  forces  tended  to  that  birth, 
Not  all  the  world  could  change  or  hinder 
it." 

He  concludes  that  if  man  would  not  fulfill  his 
poor  life,  which  Fate  has  ordered  and  over  which 
he  has  no  control,  that  he  is  at  least  free  to  end 

[  92  ] 


TRAVELS  AND     THE  CITY 

it  when  he  will  "without  the  fear  of  waking  after 
death."  He  finds  a  tragic  irony  in  the  fact  that 
man's  one  short  life  should  be  a  spasm  of  pain 
between  two  eternal  oblivions. 

In  a  tangled,  poisonous  copse  the  poet  next 
meets  a  dotard  who  crawls  painfully  backward, 
in  an  endeavor  to  regain  the  innocence  and  delight 
of  a  previous  existence.  Yet  the  way  is  dark  and 
he  has  unknowingly  traversed  all  its  winding  paths 
over  and  over  again.  Thomson  had  been  fasci- 
nated by  the  Oriental  idea  of  the  transmigration 
of  souls,  as  we  have  seen  in  the  Ladies  of  Death, 
but  here  he  finds  it  to  be  only  another  tragic 
mockery  of  existence.  At  length  he  comes  to 
the  dark  River  of  Suicides,  and  overhears  two 
weary  men  discuss  self-murder  as  a  means  of 
escaping  from  life.  Here  Thomson's  own  rea- 
sons for  avoiding  the  escape  which  he  had  pic- 
tured with  such  ghastly  distinctness  in  In  the 
Room,  are  made  clear.  He  wishes  to  see  "what 
shifts  are  yet  in  the  dull  play,"  and  to  "refrain 
from  grieving  Dear  foolish  friends  by  our  un- 
timely leaving."  Yet  with  admirable  courage  he 
concludes  that  "it  is  but  for  one  night  after  all," 
and  that  even  Fate  cannot  at  length  deny  to  him 
and  to  all  men  "That  one  best  sleep  that  never 
wakes  again." 

The  City  embodies  a  typical,  frequent  and 
perhaps  dominant  mood  in  the  poet's  life.  He 
well  knows  that  on  some  mornings  the  inhabitants 

[  93  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

of  the  "dolent  city"  awake  as  though  reborn,  and 
freed  for  a  time  from  its  grasp.  Yet  this  always 
proves  only  a  mocking  reprieve,  never  a  triumph- 
ant escape.  Once  that  city's  terrible  streets  have 
been  trod,  hope  withers  and  the  victim  is  helpless 
under  the  doom  of  his  terrible  dreams.  Time  is 
an  intolerable  burden  to  him,  and  only  in  the 
annihilation  of  death  is  there  any  peace.  That 
some  men  are  free  from  the  "city's  curse"  only 
intensifies  his  pain,  and  there  is  no  saving  com- 
munity of  sorrow  within  its  walls.  Over  the  city 
the  stars  burn  on,  night  after  weary  night,  more 
lasting  but  not  eternal  symbols  of  the  meaningless 
chaos  which  pervades  all  the  cosmos. 

The  City  ends  with  two  tremendous  allegories. 
In  the  first,  a  triumphant  angel  in  stone  opposes 
the  vacant-eyed  Sphinx  of  Nature.  In  turn  the 
angel's  wings  and  sword  fall,  and  it  becomes  a 
doomed  and  helpless  man.  Then  the  man  falls, 
while  there  remains  only  the  "cold  majestic  face" 
of  the  eternal  Sphinx,  "whose  vision  seemed  of 
infinite  void  space."  In  the  second  and  conclud- 
ing allegory,  Thomson  brilliantly  describes  Mel- 
ancholia, the  patron  saint  of  the  City.  He  has 
transferred  the  actual  details  and  the  strange  fas- 
cination of  Durer's  great  engraving  into  poetry. 
She  is  the  emblem  of  the  human  race,  which 
struggles  with  a  vain  but  continual  heroism 
against  its  bitter  destiny.  She  knows  that  in  the 
end  all  struggles  are  frustrated,  that 

[  94  ] 


TRAVELS  AND     THE  CITY 

"None  can  pierce  the  vast  black  veil  uncer- 
tain 
Because  there  is  no  light  beyond  the  cur- 
tain, 
That  all  is  vanity  and  nothingness." 

So  she  rests  there  forever  in  "bronze  sublimity" 
over  her  tragic  city,  a  symbol  of  the  poet's  own 
sad,  unshaken  heroism  in  the  face  of  certain 
disaster: 

"The  moving  moon  and  stars  from  east  to 
west 
Circle  before  her  in  the  sea  of  air; 
Shadows  and  gleams  glide  round  her  solemn 
rest. 
Her  subjects  often  gaze  up  to  her  there; 
The  strong  to  drink  new  strength  of  iron 

endurance; 
The  weak,  new  terrors;  all,  renewed  assur- 
ance 
And  confirmation  of  the  old  despair." 

Thus  ends  the  City  of  Dreadful  Night,  one  of  the 
saddest  and  most  terrible  poems  any  man  ever 
wrote. 

Thomson  finished  the  City  in  1874  during 
intervals  between  various  hackwork — economic 
and  political  articles,  educational  and  literary 
essays,  and  many  other  of  the  sorry  affairs  that 

[  95  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

the  present  pays  for  and  the  future  forgets.  He 
had  again  taken  up  fairly  regular  contributing  to 
Bradlaugh's  National  Reformer  and  it  was  in  this 
dubiously  respectable  but  open-minded  magazine 
that  the  City  was  first  published  in  four  install- 
ments, from  March  22  to  May  17,  1874.  From 
this  time  dates  what  recognition  Thomson  ever 
received  as  a  poet. 

A  few  leading  reviews  paid  their  acknowledg- 
ments, mostly,  despite  Mr.  Dobell's  enthusiastic 
account  of  the  matter,  with  no  little  air  of  patron- 
age. The  City,  like  all  his  previous  articles  and 
poems,  had  been  signed  "B.  V."  and  his  anonym- 
ity, though  quite  characteristic  of  his  apparent 
indifference  to  public  opinion,  hindered  his  becom- 
ing as  well  known  as  he  might  otherwise  have 
been.  Yet  to  a  poet  discouraged  by  twenty  years 
of  obscurity,  it  was  no  small  pleasure  to  receive 
recognition  from  many  other  noted  literary  men 
and  women.  George  Meredith,  P.  B.  Marston, 
the  blind  poet,  W.  M.  Rossetti,  and  Saintsbury 
were  at  once  attracted  by  the  obvious  merits  of 
the  City.  George  Eliot  congratulated  him  in  a 
stately  but  sincere  letter  on  his  "distinct  vision 
and  grand  utterance."  Bertram  Dobell  tells  with 
a  pardonable  wealth  of  detail  how  he  found  out 
who  UB.  V."  was  from  the  National  Reformer, 
and  became  an  intimate  friend  of  the  poet.  Event 
in  America,  both  Emerson  and  Longfellow  recog-l 
nized  the  greatness  of  the  City. 

[  96  ] 


CHAPTER  VI 

THE  "SEVEN  SONGLESS  YEARS" 
(1874-1881) 

TO  say  that  the  sudden  recognition  accorded 
the  City  of  Dreadful  Night  by  such  a  dis- 
tinguished company  of  authors  and  critics  did  not 
influence  Thomson's  later  years,  would  be  ob- 
viously untrue.  Yet  the  tragic  struggle  of  his 
inner  life  seems  to  have  been  changed  very  little 
by  it.  His  poetic  energies  had  for  a  time  almost  \ 
burned  themselves  out  in  the  City.  What  Thom- 
son called  his  "seven  songless  years"  ensued  when, 
for  the  first  time  in  his  life,  good  poems  from  his 
hand  would  probably  have  attracted  general 
attention,  and  won  him  fame  with  the  general 
public,  instead  of  the  limited  circle  of  critics  who 
already  knew  his  work.  Between  1874  and 
1 88 1  he  wrote  mostly  hack-verse  for  distinctly 
secular  purposes,  such  as  the  Prologue  to  the  Pil- 
grimage of  Saint  Nicotine  of  the  Holy  Herb, 
which  is  perhaps  as  good  advertising  verse  as  the 
average  major  poet  can  write.  A  few  satirical 
poems  also  can  occasionally  be  found,  which  have 
the    form    and   some    of   the   humorous   zest   of 

[  97  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

Browning.  Usually  these  drift  into  religious  or 
theological  channels,  and  are  hardly  orthodox. 
Bill  Jones  on  Prayer,  while  a  hastily  written  )eu 
d'esprit,  illustrates  Thomson's  position  rather 
well: 

"God  helpeth  him  who  helps  himself, 

They  preach  to  us  as  a  fact, 
Which  seems  to  lay  up  God  on  the  shelf, 

And  leave  the  man  to  act. 
Which  seems  to  mean — You  do  the  work, 

Have  all  the  trouble  and  pains, 
While  God,  that  Indolent  Grand  Old  Turk, 

Gets  credit  for  the  gains." 

These  years,  however,  bulk  large  in  his  critical 
prose  works,  and  some  imaginative  pieces,  like 
In  our  Forest  of  the  Past  and  Saint  Sylvester's 
Day,  are  occasionally  found  among  them.  Al- 
most all  the  work  that  he  did  during  these  seven 
years  bespeaks  industry,  but  little  of  that  passion- 
ate imaginative  power  which  his  greatest  writing 
reveals.  He  vainly  tried  for  several  years  to  find 
a  publisher  for  his  poems,  but  more  through  his 
financial  needs  than  through  ambition.  He  came 
more  and  more  to  live  within  his  own  mind,  with 
even  more  torpor  and  indifference  than  before. 
In  spite  of  his  hard  grasp  of  fact,  he  often  failed 
to  distinguish  the  real  world  from  that  inner  and 
imaginary  world  into  which  he  retired  more  and 
more  as  the  years  went  by.     Mr.  Salt  records  a 

[  98  ] 


THE      SEVEN  SONGLESS  YEARS 

curious    instance    of   this    trait    from    the    poet's 
diary: 

"Sunday,  March  2 — Queer  dream,  morng. 
Condemned  to  death  for  sort  of  manslaugh- 
ter on  one  who  deserved  it  for  wronging 
another.  No  remorse,  no  fear,  some  per- 
plexity as  to  chance  of  commut.  to  imprison- 
ment for  life.  Some  trouble  on  waking  to 
make  sure  it  had  been  a  dream." 

Thomson  supported  himself  in  his  lonely  lodg- 
ings entirely  by  his  hackwork.  He  was  a  con- 
firmed smoker,  and  was  increasingly  given  to  fits 
of  intemperance  when  his  melancholia,  rendered 
now  more  acute  by  his  growing  insomnia,  proved 
too  unbearable.  His  intemperance  was  periodic, 
like  a  disease.  G.  W.  Foote,  an  intimate  friend, 
wrote  of  this  infirmity: 

"He  was  not  a  toper;  on  the  contrary,  he 
was  a  remarkably  temperate  man,  both  in 
eating  and  drinking.  His  intemperate  fits 
came  on  periodically,  like  other  forms  of 
madness;  and  naturally  as  he  grew  older  and 
weaker  they  lasted  longer,  and  the  lucid  in- 
tervals became  shorter.  The  fits  were  inva- 
riably preceded  by  several  days  of  melan- 
choly, which  deepened  and  deepened  until  it 
became  intolerable.  Then  he  flew  to  the 
alcohol,  so  naturally  and  unconsciously  that 

[  99  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

when  he  returned  to  sanity  he  could  seldom 
remember  the  circumstances  of  his  collapse." 

Other  intimate  friends  of  the  poet  during  the 
"seven  songless  years"  have  borne  testimony  to 
the  grim,  soldierly  courage  with  which  Thomson 
fought  off  these  attacks.  All  seem  to  agree  that 
during  this  period  of  his  life  they  recurred  sev- 
eral months  apart.  It  may  be  that  he  sometimes 
took  opium,  although  certainly  never  to  the  extent 
that  some  moralists  would  have  us  believe. 

Thomson's  diary  for  1875  has  unfortunately 
been  lost,  and  the  chief  source  of  information 
about  the  poet  lies  in  his  letters  to  Bertram 
Dobell.  While  these  deal  mainly  with  Thomson's 
vain  efforts  to  find  a  publisher  for  his  poems,  yet 
this  correspondence  also  preserves  the  record  of 
his  final  separation  from  Bradlaugh,  especially  in 
the  following  extracts: 

"January  i8t  1875 — I'm  still  on  the  staff 
of  the  noble  N.  R.  but  have  been  crowded 
out  of  late.  C.  B.  and  Ajax  (Mrs.  Besant) 
take  up  much  room,  and  we  wanted  to  bring 
in  other  things.  I'm  always  willing  to  give 
way,  especially  when  doing  so  saves  me  from 
writing  nonsense.  I  resume  in  next  week's 
number. 

April  17,  1875 — Your  former  note  came 
too  late  for  me  to  let  you  know  that  I  am 

[  100  ] 


THE  "SEVEN  SONGLESS  TJEAR?" 

always  late  on  Wednesdays.  On  that  night 
the  N.  R.  goes  to  press;  I  am  not  done  with 
it  till  about  nine,  Watts  till  about  eleven;  so 
he  and  I  with  a  few  others  generally  spend 
an  hour  or  two  together  after  nine,  waiting 
for  the  first  proof. 

May  i8)  1875 — You  may  tell  anyone  you 
like  my  name,  as  the  N.  R.  people  and  B. 
haven't  in  the  least  respected  the  anonymity. 
I  shall  put  my  name  to  the  volume  if  pub- 
lished. As  to  my  position,  I  don't  want 
strangers  to  know  that  I  am  somewhat  hard 
up;  it's  none  of  their  business.  They  may 
know  that  I  help  and  contribute  to  the  N.  R. 
for  all  I  care.  .  .  .  Philip  Bourke  Marston 
has  been  at  the  office  wanting  a  copy  of  the 
City. 

July  9,  1875 — I  believe  a  good  many 
(copies  of  the  prospective  volume)  would  be 
disposed  of  through  advertisement  in  the 
N.  R.  I  am  quite  off  this  now,  B.  having 
taken  the  first  opportunity  of  terminating 
our  connection,  which  I  myself  had  only  sub- 
mitted to  for  some  time  past  because  it 
afforded  me  mere  subsistence.  So  I  must  get 
other  engagements  at  once,  and  a  published 
volume  would  be  of  immense  service  to  me. 
Of  course  B.  could  not  refuse  my  advertise- 
ment, nor  do  I  suppose  he  would  charge  for 
it  even  now,  seeing  that  he  had  all  the  verses 

[  101  ] 


LiFF.  OF  jAMKS  THOMSON 

for  nothing;  but  I  should  send  it  to  the  office 
in  the  ordinary  way  of  business. 

August  24f  1875 — I  go  in  for  this  new 
paper  (Foote  and  Holyoake's  Secular 
Weekly)  thoroughly  of  course,  not  caring 
to  be  gagged  at  the  pleasure  of  Mr.  B." 

The  facts  concerning  this  permanent  quarrel 
which  he  had  with  Bradlaugh  early  in  1875,  are 
not  clearly  preserved.  Dobell's  Memoir  is  no 
doubt  quite  just  in  laying  the  blame  principally  on 
the  poet.  Since  Thomson's  dismissal  from  the 
army,  Bradlaugh  had  always  been  the  poet's 
greatest  and  most  convenient  aid.  Bradlaugh  had 
housed  him  and  procured  for  him  a  clerkship  in 
1862,  had  enabled  him  to  print  in  the  National 
Reformer  articles  and  poems  which  very  few  if 
any  magazines  would  accept,  had  got  him  his 
position  as  war  correspondent  in  Spain,  and  after 
that  failure  had  given  him  regular  employment 
on  the  Reformer.  That  by  doing  so  Bradlaugh 
did  much  to  keep  his  own  name  alive,  is  the  acci- 
dent of  fate  rather  than  any  intentional  effort  on 
the  poet's  part.  Bradlaugh  was  eminently  prac- 
tical, and  largely  insensitive  to  the  poet's  genius. 
To  him,  Thomson  was  an  intimate  friend  who 
had  made  a  failure  of  practical  life.  On  the  other 
hand,  the  poet  was  usually  very  loyal  in  his  friend- 
ships, and  just  in  his  dealings  with  men.  The  real 
wonder  of  it  is,  however,  not  that  there  should 

[  102  ] 


THE      SEVEN  SONGLESS  YEARS 

have  been  a  quarrel,  but  that  the  quarrel  should 
have  been  so  long  delayed.  Bradlaugh  was  a 
practical  iconoclast,  a  man  of  action,  and  quite 
positive  in  his  views.  Thomson  was  at  heart  an 
idealist  and  a  man  of  thought,  who  was  inter- 
ested in  practical  affairs  only  because  he  had  to 
make  a  living.  Had  the  rupture  never  taken 
place,  perhaps  the  poet's  last  days  might  have 
proved  less  awful,  for  Thomson  had  come  to  lean 
upon  the  reformer's  stronger  and  more  positive 
nature  in  times  of  trouble,  more  than  he  himself 
realized  at  the  time.  Next  perhaps  to  Matilda 
Weller,  Bradlaugh  exerted  more  influence  upon 
Thomson's  life  than  any  other  human  being. 
The  two  men  as  a  matter  of  fact  had  many  com- 
mon beliefs  about  religion  and  society,  as  Thom- 
son had  confessed  some  time  before  in  a  letter 
to  his  sister-in-law: 

"So  you  are  rather  glad  that  I  am  no 
longer  with  B.,  exposed  to  the  contagion  of 
his  dreadful  heresies.  To  tell  you  the  truth, 
I  don't  think  that  there's  a  pin  to  choose  be- 
tween his  opinions  as  to  things  in  general, 
and  my  own;  only  while  he  considers  his 
opinions  of  the  utmost  importance,  and  is 
unwearied  in  the  profitable  task  of  convert- 
ing the  world  to  them,  I  care  very  little  for 
mine,  and  don't  believe  the  world  capable  of 
being  benefited  much  by  having  any  opinion 

[  103  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

whatever  preached  to  it.  But  you  must  not 
blame  him  or  anybody  for  my  wicked  opin- 
ions, which  I  have  arrived  at  by  the  mere 
force  of  my  own  evil  nature,  influenced  very 
little  by  the  opinions  of  others.  The  Sunday 
school  views  of  this  life  and  dissolving  views 
of  a  life  hereafter  proved  quite  unsatisfac- 
tory to  this  philosopher  many  years  ago." 

When  the  National  Reformer  was  closed  to 
him  as  a  source  of  income,  Thomson  shifted  to 
Cope's  Tobacco  Plant,  a  monthly  published  by 
Liverpool  tobacco  merchants.  Although  the  pur- 
pose of  this  peculiar  magazine  was  mainly  to 
advertise  the  wares  of  its  owners,  yet  it  was  not 
at  all  without  literary  pretensions.  Thomson 
wrote  critical  essays  for  it  upon  Ben  Jonson, 
Whitman,  Hogg  and  Rabelais,  as  well  as  reviews 
on  current  literature,  and  hack  articles  on  various 
phases  of  the  tobacco  business.  To  this  paper  he 
contributed  until  the  end  of  his  "seven  songless 
years,"  when  it  was  discontinued.  His  best  criti- 
cal work,  however,  such  as  his  fairly  well-known 
articles  on  Heine,  were  written  for  the  Secularist, 
a  short-lived  radical  journal  to  which  his  friend, 
G.  W.  Foote,  gave  him  an  entry.  In  this  latter 
periodical  Thomson  printed  articles  on  religion, 
society  and  literature,  poems  written  during  his 
earlier  years,  and  took  a  vigorous  if  somewhat 
unwise  part  in  the  controversy  which  soon  arose 

[  104  ] 


THE      SEVEN  SONGLESS  YEARS 

between  the  Secularist  and  his  old  medium,  the 
National  Reformer.  It  was  in  Foote's  Secular- 
ist that  he  published  his  translations  from  Heine, 
which  drew  a  congratulatory  letter  from  Karl 
Marx,  the  noted  economist  and  scholar.  Heine 
had  influenced  Thomson  strongly  in  many  of  his 
poems,  notably  in  Fane's  Story.  The  latter's 
facility  in  translation  is  seen  best,  perhaps,  in  his 
version  of  Heine's  "Gods  of  Greece." 

"I  have  never  loved  you,  O  ye  Gods! 
For  not  at  all  to  my  mind  are  the  Greeks, 
And  the  Romans  I  thoroughly  hate; 
Yet  pious  compassion  and  sorrowful  sym- 
pathy 
Possess  my  heart, 
When  I  see  you  now  above  there 
Desolate  deities, 

Dead,  night-wandering  shadows, 
Frail  clouds,  driven  by  the  wind, — 
And  when  I  think  how  mean  and  blatant 
The  Gods  are  who  have  overcome  you, 
The  new,  dominant,  melancholy  Gods, 
So  malignant  in  their  sheep's  clothing  of 

humility — 
O  then  seizes  me  a  gloomy  rage, 
And  I  could  shatter  the  new  temple, 
And  fight  for  you,  you  ancient  Gods, 
For  you  and  your  joyous  ambrosial  sway, 
And  before  your  high  altars 

[  105  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

Broad-built  and  steaming  with  sacrifices, 
I  could  even  kneel  and  pray 
And  suppliant  arms  uplift. 
Though  always  aforetime,  O  ye  Gods, 
In  the  battles  and  dissensions  of  men, 
Ye  have  fought  on  the  side  of  the  strongest; 
Yet  man  is  more  magnanimous  than  you, 
And  in  the  Battle  of  the  Gods  I  range  my- 
self 
With    the    followers    of    the    vanquished 
Gods!" 

From  1876  until  a  month  before  his  death, 
Thomson  lodged  in  35  Alfred  Street.  His  most 
intimate  friends,  G.  W.  Foote  of  the  Secularist, 
with  which  paper  the  poet  was  at  this  time  con- 
nected, and  T.  R.  Wright,  who  had  married  the 
widow  of  Thomson's  old  friend,  Austin  Hol- 
yoake,  lived  close  at  hand  at  12  Gower  Street. 
As  a  consequence  Thomson  became  almost  a  mem- 
ber of  the  Wright  household  during  the  last  six 
years  of  his  life.  His  diary  records  the  quiet  and 
uneventful  evenings  spent  in  the  British  Museum, 
in  his  lodgings,  or  with  these  friends : 

"Wednesday,  Jan.  8 — Bitter  easterly. 
Some  sun.  Morng  &  evng.  Fair  copy 
Memorial.  .  .  .  Aftn,  walk  about  Soho. 
(Coal  scuttle;  after  three  years.)  Moon 
keen  as  crystal,  sky  pale  and  cloudless,  stars 

[  106  ] 


THE      SEVEN  SONGLESS  YEARS 

few  and  dim,  ground  like  iron,  wind  like  a 
razor. 

Monday,  Feb.  17 — Fog  morng.  Some  sun 
midday.  Wet  evg.  Cool.  N.  W.  Morng,  up 
late,  dawdled.  (Poor  strange  cat  in  back 
coal-cellar  and  under  kitchen  since  Saty. 
morng.)  Aftn.  Stroll  Oxford  St.  also  be- 
fore dinner.  Evng.  Reading  Erasme :  Elo- 
gie  de  la  Folie  (Biblio.  Nationale.)  Slight 
bilious  indigestion,  listless  and  sleepy.  Beer 
early  for  early  bed. 

Ash  Wednesday,  Feb.  26 — Cold  N.  E. 
wind;  glum;  snow  in  the  air,  slight  powder 
falling.  Morng.  to  B.  M.  Shut.  Did  my 
Commination  Service  alone;  cursing  the 
idiots  who  close  such  a  place  on  such  a  day. 
Stroll  before  dinner.  Aftn,  Gower  St.  Evg, 
writing  bit  of  Men  of  Letters.  Reading 
Goldsmith.     Coals   ( 1 )   full. 

Friday,  Feb.  28 — The  dull  rheumatic  pains 
shoulders  and  right  arm  continue ;  slight,  but 
I  rather  fear  after  father. 

Thursday,  Aug.  14 — Have  got  into  a  bad 
way  of  waking  two  or  three  hours  before  I 
want  to  get  up  (before  5  or  6)  &  being  un- 
able to  sleep  afterwards.  Hence  I  arise 
weary  at  last;  and  am  very  drowsy  after  tea, 
when  I  want  to  read  or  write.  This  morng. 
awoke  5  :  40 ;  this  evg.  had  to  lie  down  & 

[  107  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

slept  from  6:30  to  8:30;  losing  two  good 
hours. 

Saturday,  Nov.  8 — Athenaeum,  advt.  of 
Egoist :  cordial  praise  from  Athenm,  Pall 
Mall,  Spectr,  Examr.  At  length !  At  length ! 
A  man  of  wonderful  genius  &  a  splendid 
writer  may  hope  to  obtn.  something  like 
recogn.  after  working  hard  for  thirty  years, 
dating  from  his  majority. 

Christmas  Day — Black  fog  midday,  and 
until  night.  Morng.  (late)  answg  Fraser's 
with  receipt.  Dined  Gower  St.  Billiard  & 
Evg.     Home  12:  20  or  so.     Bed  past  one. 

Wednesday,  Dec.  31 — Saw  Old  Year  out 
and  New  Year  in  at  Mitchell's;  with 
Wright's  &  Cards,  Whist  and  Vingt-un." 

Especially  significant  among  these  entries  are 
the  indications  of  the  poet's  failing  health,  which 
had  been  first  seriously  impaired  on  his  Spanish 
trip  in  1873,  and  had  grown  constantly  worse 
from  his  sedentary  life  as  a  hack-writer  in  Lon- 
don. Insomnia  is  particularly  mentioned  in  his 
diaries  from  1873  to  1879.  During  the  last  year 
there  were  unmistakable  signs  of  more  serious 
disorders.  He  mentions  "a  queer  catching  pain" 
in  the  back,  and  a  constriction  "over  and  about 
the  heart."  As  is  evident  from  the  entry  in  his 
diary   for    February    28    quoted   above,    he   was 

[  108  ] 


THE      SEVEN  SONGLESS  YEARS 

apprehensive  of  a  paralytic  stroke  like  his  father's 
forty  years  before. 

Thomson's  increasing  weakness  had  the  result 
of  changing  his  pessimism  from  a  frequent  and 
vigorous  emotional  attitude,  to  a  calm,  settled 
intellectual  conviction.  G.  W.  Foote  {Progress, 
June,  1884)  has  sympathetically  described  the 
poet's  feelings  and  beliefs  at  this  period  of  his 
career: 

"Thomson's  life  inclined  him  to  a  pessi- 
mistic view  of  nature,  yet  it  must  not  be  sup- 
posed that  his  philosophy  was  merely  a  mat- 
ter of  temperament.  He  was  little  of  a 
cynic  and  less  of  a  misanthrope,  and  you 
could  not  have  inferred  his  philosophy  from 
his  ordinary  conversation.  He  was  natur- 
ally chary  of  talking  about  his  ideas  even  to 
his  intimate  friends,  but  when  he  broke 
through  his  customary  reticence  he  spoke 
with  the  quiet  gravity  of  intense  conviction. 
I  well  remember  the  first  time  he  ever  con- 
versed with  me  on  the  subject.  It  was  a 
still  summer's  night,  and  we  sat  together  on 
the  Thames  Embankment  at  Chelsea.  We 
smoked  and  chatted  for  a  long  time,  and 
growing  more  communicative  under  the  influ- 
ence of  that  tender  sunset,  we  gradually  sank 
into  the  depths.  I  found  his  pessimism  as 
stubborn  as  adamant.     It  was  not  a  mood, 

[  109  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

but  a  philosophy,  the  settled  conviction  of  a 
keen  spectator  of  the  great  drama  of  life. 
He  admitted  that  he  had  no  special  reason 
to  scorn  his  fellows;  on  the  contrary,  he  had 
met  many  good  friends,  who  had  treated 
him  'better  than  he  deserved.'  But  all  that 
was  beside  the  question.  He  denied  the  real- 
ity of  progress  in  the  world;  there  was  revo- 
lution, but  no  forward  movement;  the  bal- 
ance of  good  and  evil  remained  through  all 
changes  unchanged;  and  eventually  the  hu- 
man race,  with  all  its  hopes  and  fears,  its 
virtues  and  crimes,  its  triumphs  and  failures, 
would  be  swept  into  oblivion.  In  conclusion 
he  quoted  Shakespeare,  a  very  rare  thing 
with  him;  and  he  rose  from  his  seat  with 
Prospero's  matchless  words  upon  his  lips.'^ 

There  is  one,  and  only  one,  exception  to  the 
"seven  songless  years."  In  1878  Thomson  wrote 
a  poem  which  was,  as  usual,  strongly  biographi- 
cal. Since  he  never  finished  it,  he  prevented  it 
from  ever  being  published,  and  the  sketch  has 
long  since  been  destroyed.  But  Dobell,  in  his 
excellent  Memoir  prefixed  to  the  1895  volume  of 
collected  poems,  has,  despite  the  poet's  own 
injunctions,  quoted  several  striking  stanzas,  and 
given  a  prose  summary  of  the  rest. 

In  a  prose  postscript  to  this  poem  which  Dobell 
reprints,  Thomson  remarks  concerning  it,  "writ- 

[  no  ] 


THE      SEVEN  SONGLESS  YEARS 

ing  the  foregoing  lines  I  have  felt  like  a  man 
making  his  will  at  the  gates  of  Death,  summing  up 
life's  scars."  We  have  little  reason  to  question 
Dobell's  assertion  that  Thomson  here  "laid  bare 
his  inmost  soul."  Yet  he  found  that  the  poem 
was  "too  hard  and  harsh  in  both  conception  and 
execution  for  attempt  at  polishing — far  more 
truth  than  poetry  in  it."  That  Dobell  did  not 
publish  it  complete  in  spite  of  the  poet's  wishes, 
is  perhaps  the  only  mistake  he  made  when  edit- 
ing the  poet's  complete  works. 

According  to  his  summary  of  the  poem,  Thom- 
son attributed  his  life-long  unhappiness  to  the 
death  of  Matilda.  After  that  tragedy,  his  mind 
had  fed  upon  itself,  all  Faith,  Hope  and  Love 
departed  from  him,  and  only  his  grief  remained. 
Although  on  the  whole  he  would  have  preferred 
to  die,  his  art  as  a  poet  consoled  him  to  some  ex- 
tent. Suffering  and  reflection  had  taught  him 
that  Immortality  was  a  delusion,  and  that  there- 
fore Matilda,  who  might  have  given  his  life  hap- 
piness and  success,  was  eternally  lost  to  him.  So 
greatly  did  he  think  the  pains  of  life  outweighed 
its  joys,  that  even  if  his  youth  with  her  could  be 
restored,  he  would  not  now  selfishly  accept  it. 
She  was  now  eternally  at  rest,  as  he  too  shortly 
expected  to  be.  These  utterly  hopeless  views 
Thomson  states  without  artistic  allegory,  but 
tersely  and  with  entirely  frank  self-analysis. 
The  whole  poem  shows  that  these  seven  years  of 

[  HI  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

poetic  apathy  were  quite  the  most  painful  of  the 
poet's  life,  since  there  was  no  escape  as  before 
into  the  kindly  illusion  that  creative  poetry 
afforded  him.  This  nameless  poem,  however 
faithfully  it  summarizes  the  poet's  whole  life,  is 
probably  a  still  more  accurate  record  of  his  inner 
life  during  the  "seven  songless  years." 

William  M.  Rossetti,  with  whom  Thomson 
had  long  corresponded,  both  concerning  his  own 
poems,  and  various  aspects  of  Shelley's  works, 
wrote  an  acute  description  of  Thomson's  appear- 
ance at  this  time: 

"He  came  one  evening,  when  the  only 
person  at  home  with  me  was  my  elder  sister 
(authoress  of  A  Shadow  of  Dante).  I  saw 
him  partly  alone  and  partly  in  my  sister's 
company.  Thomson  was  a  rather  small 
man — hardly  five  feet  six  in  height — with 
sufficiently  regular  features,  bright  eyes,  and 
at  that  time  a  cheerful,  pleasant  manner. 
There  was  (but  I  think  only  in  later  years) 
a  rather  peculiar  expression  in  his  mouth; 
something  of  a  permanently  pained  expres- 
sion, along  with  a  settled  half-smile,  caustic 
but  not  cynical;  not  'put  on,'  but  adopted  as 
part  of  his  attitude  toward  the  world.  I 
had  expected  to  find  him  rather  of  the  type  of 
the  intellectual  working-man,  but  did  not  find 
this  to  be  the  fact;  he  seemed  to  me  more  of 

[  112  ] 


THE  "SEVEN  SONGLESS  YEARS 

the  'city-clerk'  or  minor  man  of  business  with 
literary   tastes.      His   manners   were    good, 
free   from  nervousness,   pretension   or   self- 
assertion.      He   talked   extremely   well,    and 
without,  I  think,  any  symptom  of  defective 
education,  except  that  his  h's  were  sometimes 
less  aspirated  than  they  should  be.    Not  that 
he  dropped  his  h's,  and  he  certainly  never 
inserted  them  where  they  ought  not  to  come. 
There  was  no  trace  of  the  Scotchman  in  his 
pronunciation.     We  passed  a  pleasant  even- 
ing, and  I  can  recollect  that  my  sister,  who 
was  an  intense  religious  devotee,  received  an 
agreeable    impression    from    his    conversa- 
tion— which   shows   that   he  knew  when   to 
keep  his  strong  opinions  to  himself.   ...  I 
never  saw  him  out  of  temper,  vehement  or 
noticeably  gloomy;  his  demeanor  mostly  (so 
far  as  I  saw  it)  was  that  of  a  man  of  habit- 
ually low  spirits,  who  did  not  allow  these  to 
affect  his  manner  in  society  or  the  tone  of  his 
conversation." 


[  113  ] 


CHAPTER  VII 
LAST  DAYS  (1881-1882) 

rilHOMSON  was  not,  however,  doomed  to  die 
-■■  in  the  apathetic  state  of  decay  which  charac- 
terized the  "seven  songless  years."  Fate  took 
care  that  his  spirit  should  not  be  dulled  into 
insensibility  by  failure.  At  this  critical  turning 
point  in  his  career,  destiny  again  endowed  him 
with  a  modicum  of  success,  that  his  hopes  might 
be  reinvigorated,  and  his  final  defeat  rendered 
the  more  bitter.  In  1880,  when  the  poet  had 
almost  given  up  hope  of  ever  printing  his  collected 
poems,  Dobell  succeeded  in  persuading  Reeves  & 
Turner  to  publish  in  book  form  Thomson's  City 
and  other  chief  poems.  Until  now,  copies  of  the 
City  were  practically  unobtainable,  as  it  had  been 
printed  only  in  the  National  Reformer,  and  in 
sections.  This  1880  volume  was  modestly  suc- 
cessful, and  was  fairly  well  reviewed.  The  most 
flattering  attention  came  from  Meredith  in  a 
letter  of  April  27 : 

"...  In  writing  to  you  about  this  admir- 
able and  priceless  book  of  verse  I  have 
wished  to  be  competent  to  express  my  feeling 
for  your  merit,  and  as  much  as  possible  the 

[  114  ] 


LAST  DAYS 

praise  of  such  rarely  equalled  good  work. 
My  friends  could  tell  you  that  I  am  a  critic 
hard  to  please.  They  say  that  irony  lurks 
in  my  eulogy.  .  .  .  Well,  I  have  gone 
through  your  volume,  and  partly  a  second 
time,  and  I  have  not  found  the  line  I  would 
propose  to  recast.  I  have  found  many  pages 
that  no  other  English  poet  could  have  writ- 
ten. Nowhere  is  the  verse  feeble,  nowhere 
is  the  expression  insufficient;  the  majesty  of 
the  line  has  always  its  full  coloring,  and 
marches  under  a  banner.  And  you  accom- 
plish this  effect  with  the  utmost  sobriety,  with 
absolute  self-mastery." 

As  the  result  of  their  subsequent  correspondence, 
Thomson  made  the  acquaintance  of  Meredith, 
and  on  the  29th  of  June  spent  a  day  with  him 
at  Dorking.  Thomson  had  been  a  reader  of  the 
"prose  Browning's"  novels  when  they  were  re- 
ceiving very  little  attention  from  the  general 
reading  public.  His  diary  records  his  pleasure  at 
this  visit: 

"July  1st — Spent  with  Meredith,  a  real 
red-letter  day  in  all  respects.  He  is  one  of 
those  personalities  who  need  fear  no  com- 
parison with  their  best  works." 

The   success  of  the    1880  volume   encouraged 
Thomson  to  turn  again  to  the  writing  of  poetry. 

[  115  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

In  1 88 1  he  wrote  two  good  poems,  A  Voice  from 
the  Nile  and  Richard  Forest's  Midsummer  Night, 
beside  a  few  trifling  verses  on  occasional  subjects. 
It  is  not  without  significance  that  of  these  two 
poems  with  which  he  broke  his  seven  years'  silence, 
one  is  joyful  and  the  other  sad.  The  Midsummer 
Night  is  a  passionate  lyric  medley  of  love,  which 
in  certain  parts  rivals,  although  somewhat  danger- 
ously suggests,  Tennyson's  Maud.  Nothing  could 
seem  further  from  the  terrible  visions  and  sounds 
of  the  City  than  these  richly  melodious  love-songs: 

"Oh,  how  the  nights  are  short, 
These  heavenly  nights  of  June ! 

The  long  day  all  amort 

With  toil,  the  time  to  court 
So  stinted  in  its  boon. 

"When  deep  in  fern  we  lie 
With  golden  gorse  above; 
Deep  sapphire  sea  and  sky, 
Ringing  of  larks  on  high 

One  whole  world  breathing  love. 

"The  Spring  renews  its  youth 
And  youth  renews  its  spring; 

Love's  wildest  dreams  are  truth, 

Magic  is  sober  sooth; 

Charm  of  the  Magic  Ring." 

Yet  only  one  month  before,  the  same  poet  had 
written  in  A  Voice  from  the  Nile,  of  the  unceas- 

[  116  ] 


LAST  DAYS 

ing  law  of  change  in  the  universe,  and  of  the 
instability  of  all  human  things.  The  reader  looks 
in  vain  for  Thomson's  former  fierce  vividness  of 
phrase : 

"Dusk  memories  haunt  me  of  an  infinite  pastv 
Ages  and  cycles  brood  above  my  springs, 
Though  I  remember  not  my  primal  birth. 
So  ancient  is  my  being  and  august, 
I  know  not  anything  more  venerable; 
Unless,  perchance,  the  vaulting  skies  that 

hold 
The  sun  and  moon  and  stars  that  shine  on 

me, 
The  air  that  breathes  upon  me  with   de- 
light, 
And  Earth,  All-Mother,  all-beneficent, 
Who  held  her  mountains  forth  like  opulent 

breasts 
To  cradle  me  and  feed  me  with  their  snows, 
And  hollowed  out  the  great  sea  to  receive 
My  overplus  of  flowing  energy: 
Blessed  for  ever  be  our  Mother  Earth." 

This  brief  monologue,  the  only  blank  verse 
that  Thomson  ever  wrote,  has  an  intellectual  calm 
which  is  new.  Its  pessimism  is  the  impersonal 
intellectual  pessimism  of  Matthew  Arnold.  Al- 
though mankind  seems  to  Thomson  a  tragic  out- 
growth of  blind  nature,  a  chance  product  which 

[  H7  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

now  at  last  has  grown  conscious  of  its  tenuous 
and  hopeless  position,  yet  for  the  moment  he 
holds  himself  as  an  artist  securely  aloof  from  the 
process: 

"For  thirty  generations  of  my  corn 
Outlast  a  generation  of  my  men, 
And  thirty  generations  of  my  men 
Outlast  a  generation  of  their  gods: 
O  admirable,  pitiable  man, 
My  child  yet  alien  in  my  family." 

In  the  fall  of  1880,  another  collection  of 
Thomson's  poems,  entitled,  Vane's  Story,  and 
Other  Poems'1  had  been  published  by  Dobell 
through  Reeves  &  Turner,  but  did  not  sell  well. 
In  1 88 1  a  collection  of  Thomson's  prose  called 
"Essays  and  Phantasies"  met  with  an  equally  un- 
fortunate and  quite  undeserved  fate.  Of  this  edi- 
tion only  three  hundred  copies  survived  a  fire  at 
the  printer's.  The  account  which  Mr.  Salt  gives 
of  these  publications  is  rather  misleading,  as  he 
quite  overestimates  their  success. 

The  winter  of  1 881-1882  was  consequently  a 
rather  gloomy  one  for  the  poet.  A  letter  of 
January  5,  1881,  is  typical: 

"With  Mr.  Wright  and  Percy  (Holy- 
oake)  I  went  to  George  Eliot's  funeral.  It 
was  wretched  tramping  through  the  slush, 
and  then  standing  in  the  rain  for  about  three- 

[  118  ] 


LAST  DAYS 

quarters  of  an  hour,  with  nothing  to  see  but 
dripping  unbrellas.  I  was  disappointed  at 
there  being  any  chapel  service  at  all.  At  the 
grave  old  Dr.  Sadler  mumbled  something,  of 
which  only  two  or  three  words  could  be  dis- 
tinguished by  us,  only  a  couple  of  yards  be- 
hind him." 

Shortly  after  the  novelist's  death,  Thomson  pro- 
jected a  critical  study  of  her  writings  for  Reeves 
&  Turner.  This  work  was  abandoned  eventually 
for  a  similar  study  of  Heine,  which  in  the  course 
of  time  was  also  abandoned. 

Early  in  March,  1881,  Thomson  was  intro- 
duced by  his  friend,  T.  Wright,  to  a  Mr.  J.  W. 
Barrs  of  Leicester.  An  intimate  friendship  be- 
tween him  and  the  poet  rapidly  ensued,  and  in 
June  of  the  same  year  Thomson  paid  him  a  visit 
of  over  five  weeks.  In  many  poems  before  this, 
especially  in  Sunday  at  Hampstead,  Thomson 
had  shown  the  intense  pleasure  which  he  took  in 
slight  departures  from  the  drab  routine  of  his 
life  as  a  literary  hack  in  London.  In  society,  the 
nervous  reaction  from  the  torturing  cares  which 
so  often  oppressed  him,  rendered  him  a  lively 
and  sprightly  personality.  This  typical  mood 
had  made  him  popular  with  men  and  women  all 
his  life.  During  this  particular  visit  in  1881,  he 
seems  from  his  letters  for  a  time  quite  to  have 
thrown  off  the  deadening  personal  despair  with 

[  119  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

which  his  mechanical  duties  in  fog-ridden  London 
usually  enshrouded  him.  Both  the  Voice  from 
the  Nile  and  the  Midsummer  Night  were  con- 
ceived and  executed  here.  Of  this  pleasant  visit 
Thomson  wrote  Dobell: 

"We  are  here  four  miles  from  Leicester, 
with  railroad  station  a  few  minutes  off,  in 
a  pleasant  villa,  surrounded  by  shrubbery, 
lawn,  meadow,  and  kitchen  garden.  Host 
and  hostess  (sister)  are  kindness  itself,  as 
are  all  other  Leicester  friends.  We  lead  the 
most  healthy  of  lives,  save  to  strong  tempta- 
tions to  over-feeding  on  excellent  fare,  and 
host's  evil  and  powerfully  contagious  habit 
of  sitting  up  till  about  2  A.  M.  smoking  and 
reading  or  chatting.  I  now  leave  him  to  his 
own  wicked  devices  at  midnight,  or  as  soon 
after  as  possible.  Despite  showery  weather 
we  have  had  good  drives  and  walks  (coun- 
try all  green  and  well-wooded),  jolly  little 
picnics  and  lawn  tennis  ad  infinitum  (N.  B. 
Lawn  tennis  even  more  than  lady's  fine  pen 
responsible  for  the  uncouthness  of  this 
scrawl.)  In  brief,  we  have  been  so  busy 
with  enjoyment  that  this  is  the  first  note  I 
have  accomplished  (or  begun)  in  seventeen 
days." 

From  the  Barrs'  home  Thomson  accompanied 
Wright   on   a   business   trip   before   returning  to 

[  120  ] 


LAST  DAYS 

London.  His  copious  correspondence  with  the 
Barrs  family  dates  from  a  letter  of  June  25  to 
Miss  Barrs: 

"Raining  hard  since  6  in  the  morning  (not 
that  I  was  up  to  see  it  begin).  .  .  .  General 
despair  as  to  hay  unmown,  or  mown  and 
lying  unstacked.  Special  despair  of  B.  V. 
(Beautiful  Virtue,  mind!)  who  has  to 
scrawl  instead  of  rambling.  .    .    . 

"Phil  Wright  having  all  his  things  in  the 
other  sleeping  chamber,  I  have  the  honour 
of  sleeping  in  the  wonderful  bedstead  which 
Mr.  and  Mrs.  Noah  used  in  the  ark  some 
short  time  ago.  Under  the  beneficent  pro- 
tection of  the  good  angel  with  the  scanty 
wings  &  the  ample  nose,  and  sustained  by  a 
flawless  conscience,  I  slept  the  sleep  of  the 
just.   .    .    . 

"I  must  not  inflict  any  more  of  my  pluvial 
ennui  upon  you  just  now,  as  I  am  about  writ- 
ing for  the  first  time  to  my  good  landlady, 
who  is  a  credit  to  her  sex,  and  who  may  be 
getting  anxious  about  her  model  lodger." 

From  these  letters  one  would  never  think  of 
Thomson  as  the  author  of  the  terrible  City.  As 
we  have  seen,  this  idyllic  vacation  together  with 
the  measured  success  of  Dobell's  attempts  at  pub- 
lishing his  works,  particularly  the  first  volume  of 
1880,  had  broken  the  apathetic  spell  which  had 

[  121  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

hung  over  the  poet  during  the  "seven  songless 
years."  Even  by  January  he  had  not  forgotten 
his  visit  to  Leicester,  as  we  see  by  his  tender  and 
cheerful  stanzas  At  Belvoir: 

"My  thoughts  go  back  to  last  July, 

Sweet  happy  thoughts  and  tender; 
'The  bridal  of  the  earth  and  sky,' 

A  day  of  noble  splendor; 
A  day  to  make  the  saddest  heart 

In  joy  a  true  believer; 
When  two  good  friends  we  roamed  apart 

The  shady  walks  of  Belvoir. 

"Yet,  now  and  then  a  quiet  word 

Of  seriousness  dissembling 
In  smiles  would  touch  some  hidden  chord 

And  set  it  all  a-trembling: 
I  trembled  too,  and  felt  it  strange — 

Could  I  be  in  possession 
Of  music  richer  in  its  range 

Than  yet  had  found  expression? 

"My  thoughts  go  on  to  next  July, 

More  happy  thoughts,  more  tender; 
'The  bridal  of  the  earth  and  sky,' 

A  day  of  perfect  splendor; 
A  day  to  make  the  saddest  heart 

In  bliss  a  firm  believer; 
When  two  True  Loves  may  roam  apart 

The  shadiest  walks  of  Belvoir." 

[  122  ] 


LAST  DAYS 

This  poem,  quoted  so  extensively  more  from 
its  personal  than  its  artistic  interest,  bore  the  sub- 
title, "A  ballad,  historical  and  prophetic."  Be- 
neath its  easy  good  nature,  one  can  see  the  poet 
conscious  of  new  and  mellower  poetic  powers,  as 
he  transports  himself  out  of  dreary  London  in 
midwinter  to  this  eagerly  anticipated  season  of 
delightful  leisure  in  July,  1882.  What  results 
these  new  poetic  powers,  whose  presence  he  felt 
within  him,  would  have  produced,  no  one  can  ever 
tell,  except  from  one  later  poem,  He  Heard  Her 
Sing.  Fate  stood  also  in  the  path  of  his  prophe- 
sied visit,  for  by  July,  1882,  he  had  been  dead 
for  a  month. 

The  story  of  the  last  five  months  of  Thomson's 
life  is  a  painful  chronicle  of  the  rapid  decay  of 
a  noble  nature.  His  old  despair  again  made  his 
days  hopeless,  and  his  nights  a  sleepless  and  intol- 
erable burden.  His  fits  of  intemperance  came 
more  frequently  and  scourged  him  more  terribly 
than  ever  before.  Flaws,  who  knew  him  inti- 
mately during  the  tragic  spring  of  1882,  has 
vividly  described  his  appearance,  which  the  por- 
trait of  Mr.  Salt's  biography,  taken  this  year, 
fully  corroborates: 

"He  looked  like  a  veteran  scarred  in  fierce 
affrays  of  life's  war,  and  worn  by  the  strain 
of  forced  marches.  .  .  .  you  could  see  the 
shadow  'tremendous  fate'  had  cast  over  that 

[  123  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

naturally  buoyant  nature.  It  had  eaten  great 
furrows  into  his  broad  brow,  and  cut  tear- 
tracks  downwards  from  his  wistful  eyes,  so 
plaintive  and  brimful  of  unspeakable  tender- 
ness as  they  opened  wide  when  in  serious 
talk." 

The  curse  of  melancholia,  which  his  mother  had 
bestowed  upon  him,  had  wrecked  his  life,  and  now 
his  father's  fatal  weakness  of  intemperance  was 
also  come  upon  him,  to  drive  him  to  his  death,  de- 
spairingly at  first,  and  then  with  a  torpid  indiffer- 
ence still  more  terrible.  Fate  had  vouchsafed  him 
but  one  singing  year,  after  the  seven  that  were 
songless.  Whether  or  not,  had  he  lived,  he  could 
have  written  poetry  worthy  of  his  ironically  confi- 
dent note  in  Belvoir — and  both  Bertram  Dobell 
and  George  Meredith  asserted  that  he  could  in  no 
uncertain  terms — it  was  not  destined  to  be. 

During  the  first  month  of  1882,  Thomson 
seems  hardly  to  have  had  any  inkling  of  his  tragic 
death  so  close  at  hand.  Besides  Belvoir  he  wrote 
two  other  poems,  The  Sleeper  and  Proem,  whose 
quiet  and  melodious  melancholy  resembles  the 
Pre-Raphaelites.  In  the  first  poem  he  contem- 
plates the  slumbers  of  a  young  and  beautiful  girl, 
still  pathetically  his  lost  love,  though  now  a 
dimmer  and  more  artistically  conventionalized 
figure  than  in  his  burning  memories  in  Vane's 
Story  or  the  Fadeless  Bower.     He  is  led  to  con- 

[  124  ] 


LAST  DAYS 

trast  her  peaceful  dream  and  his  own  painful 
waking  reality.  Unlike  the  terrible  dead  beauty 
in  the  City,  drawn  with  fiery  and  almost  Dantean 
strokes,  this  slumberer  is  described  with  a  calm 
and  gentle  resignation.  The  Proem  on  the  other 
hand  looks  wistfully  backward  upon  the  "antique 
fables,  beautiful  and  bright"  in  which  the  happy 
pagan  ages  trusted.  Since  that  time  the  world 
had  grown  old  and  self-conscious,  and  its  cares 
had  become  oppressive.  Immortality  seemed  half 
a  phantasy,  and  only  Love  remained  as  man's  ref- 
uge from  Fate.  The  poem  reminds  one  of  the 
Prologue  to  the  Earthly  Paradise,  except  that 
Thomson  had  lived  more  bitterly,  thought  more 
deeply  and  dreamed  less  colorfully  than  Morris. 
During  the  next  month  of  February,  Thomson 
wrote  for  the  last  time  a  poem  which  possesses  his 
former  rapture,  and  recalls  Matilda,  dead  now 
for  almost  thirty  years.  Few  of  his  poems  have 
such  sensuously  beautiful  detail,  such  liquid  mel- 
ody, or  are  impelled  by  such  glowing  confidence  in 
Love's  triumph  over  the  indifference  of  Fate. 
Here  Nature  itself  has  felt  the  reviving  touch  of 
Spring: 

"We  were  now  in  the  midmost  Maytime,  in 
the  full  green  flood  of  the  Spring, 
When  the  air  is  sweet  all  the  daytime  with 
the  blossoms  and  birds  that  sing; 

[  125  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

When  the  air  is  rich  all  the  night,  and  rich- 
est of  all  in  its  noon 
When  the  nightingales  pant  the  delight  and 

keen  stress  of  their  love  to  the  moon; 
When    the    almond    and    apple    and    pear 

spread  wavering  wavelets  of  snow 
In  the  light  of  the  soft  warm  air  far-flushed 

with  a  delicate  glow; 
When  the  towering  chestnuts  uphold  their 

masses  of  spires  red  and  white, 
And  the  pendulous  tresses  of  gold  of  the 

slim  laburnum  burn  bright, 
And  the  lilac  guardeth  the  bowers  with  the 

gleam  of  a  lifted  spear, 
And   the    scent    of    the    hawthorn    flowers 

breathes  all  the  new  life  of  the  year 

"And  the   flowers   are   everywhere   budding 
and  blowing  about  our  feet, 
The   green   of  the   meadows   star-studding 
and    the    bright    green    blades    of    the 
wheat." 

Through  the  whole  poem,  which  in  meter  if  not 
in  spirit  is  reminiscent  of  Swinburne's  Hymn  to 
Proserpina,  there  recurs  the  confident  refrain : 

"Love,    love   only,    for   ever,   love   with   its 
torture  of  bliss 
All  the  world's  glories  can  never  equal  two 
souls  in  one  kiss." 

[  126  ] 


LAST  DAYS 

Apparently  the  new  powers,  whose  first  flush 
he  had  apprehended  in  Belvoir,  were  about  to 
become  articulate,  and  to  utter  with  an  unaccus- 
tomed joy  the  love  that  had  only  tormented  him. 
Yet  in  the  same  month  Thomson,  in  a  very  inti- 
mate and  melancholy  confession  of  his  artistic 
powers,  wrote  The  Poet  and  the  Muse.  Here 
he  feels  that,  however  joyous  the  past  poetry  of 
his  youth  had  been,  now  it  had  grown  gloomy  and 
bitter.  He  realizes  that  his  art  is  his  only  refuge 
from  life,  now  that  Love  is  dead.  Yet  he  feels 
that  even  these  poetic  powers  of  his  are  slipping 
from  his  control.  At  the  end  he  summons  cour- 
age, however,  and  declares  that  if  only  because 
he  could  suffer  bitterly,  his  artistic  faculties  were 
still  his  own: 

"I  am  half  torpid  yet  I  spurn  this  lore, 
I  am  long  silent  yet  cannot  avow 
My  singing  voice  is  lost  for  evermore; 
For  lo,  this  beating  heart,  this  burning 
brow, 
This  spirit  gasping  in  keen  spasms  of  dread 
And  fierce  revulsion  that  it  is  not  dead, 

This  agony  of  the  sting: 
What  soulless  clod  would  have  these  tears 

and  sobbings, 
These  terrors  that  are  hopes,  these  passion- 
ate throbbings? 

[  127  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

Dear  Muse,  revive!  we  yet  may  dream  and 
love  and  sing!" 

Apart  from  the  obvious  sincerity  of  The  Poet 
and  the  Muse,  it  might  perhaps  be  dismissed  as 
a  melancholy  but  frequent  mood  of  the  poet,  were 
it  not  for  the  illustration  he  gave  of  his  failing 
powers  during  the  next  month.  Only  three  poems 
survive  from  March,  1882,  and  two  of  them, 
L-azv  vs.  Gospel  and  A  Stranger,  clearly  show  a 
lesser  intellectual  grasp  of,  and  a  fading  emo- 
tional interest  in,  life.  The  Stranger  is  a  rather 
tediously  melancholy  terza  r'ima  poem  written 
with  the  pathetic  gentleness  of  a  once  powerful 
mind,  weakened  by  the  ceaseless  onslaughts  of 
Fate.  Law  vs.  Gospel  is  a  mediocre  and  hastily 
written  jeu  d' esprit,  which  alludes  sarcastically  to 
Bradlaugh  and  censures  the  intolerance  of  moral 
reformers.  Thomson  was  sinking  again  into  a 
songless  year,  apathetically  and  inevitably.  But 
just  as  the  terrible  City  was  the  precursor  to  the 
seven  songless  years  of  1 874-1 881,  so  in  Insom- 
nia, written  this  March  and  before  the  period 
which  was  destined  to  be  songless  because  the 
singer  was  dying,  Thomson  burned  out  the  last 
of  his  poetic  energies  forever  in  the  most  terrible 
poem  of  his  whole  career.  In  the  sombre  and 
awful  imagery  of  which  he  was  so  powerful  and 
unique  a  master,  he  describes  his  interminable 
nights  of  waking  despair: 

[  128  ] 


LAST  DAYS 

"I  let  my  lids  fall,  sick  of  thought  and  sense, 
But  felt  that  Shadow  heavy  on  my  heart; 
And  saw  the  night  before  me  an  immense 
Black  waste  of  ridge-walls,  hour  by  hour 
apart, 
Dividing  deep  ravines :  from  ridge  to  ridge 
Sleep's  flying  hour  was  an  aerial  bridge; 

But  I,  whose  hours  stood  fast, 
Must  climb  down  painfully  each  steep  side 

hither, 
And  climb  more  painfully  each  steep  side 

thither, 
And  so  make  one  hour's  span  for  years  of 
travail  last. 

"Thus  I  went  down  into  that  first  ravine, 
Wearily,  slowly,  blindly  and  alone, 

Staggering,    stumbling,    sinking   depths   un- 
seen, 

Shaken  and  bruised  and  gashed  by  stub  and 
stone ; 

And  at  the  bottom  paven  with  slipperiness, 

A  torrent-brook  rushed  headlong  with  such 
stress 
Against  my  feeble  limbs, 

Such  fury  of  wave  and  foam  and  icy  bleak- 
ness 

Buffeting  insupportably  my  weakness 

That  when  I  would  recall  dazed  memory 
swirls  and  swims. 

[  129  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

"How  I  got  through  I  know  not,  faint  as 
death; 
And  then  I  had  to  climb  the  awful  scarp, 
Creeping  with  many  a  pause   for  panting 
breath, 
Clinging   to    tangled    root    and    rock-jut 
sharp; 
Perspiring  with  faint  chills  instead  of  heat, 
Trembling,  and  bleeding  hands  and  knees 
and  feet; 
Falling,  to  rise  anew; 
Until,  with  lamentable  toil  and  travel 
Upon  the  ridge  of  arid  sand  and  gravel 
I  lay  supine  half-dead  and  heard  the  bells 
chime  Two." 

There  is  none  of  his  frequent  joy  in  color  and 
beauty,  no  saving  memory  of  his  lost  love,  nor 
any  melody  of  words  in  this  last  terrible  poem. 
The  words  compose  a  harsh  music  which  was  real 
to  him  then,  although  as  he  well  knew,  ugly  and 
dark: 

"I  look  back  on  the  words  already  written, 
And  writhe  by  cold  rage  stung,  by  self-scorn 

smitten, 
They  are  so  weak  and  vain  and  infinitely 

inane.   ..." 

Thomson's  sincere  pleasure  in  his  art  had 
really  done  very  much  in  keeping  him  alive  ever 

[  130  ] 


LAST  DAYS 

since  the  death  of  Matilda  in  1853.  Now  he 
knew  that  his  art  had  also  been  denied  him,  and 
that  the  end  was  therefore  not  far  off.  The 
struggle  with  his  melancholia,  darkening  as  the 
years  went  by,  and  his  sensitive  eye  and  heart, 
which  caused  him  to  see  beauty  and  love  in  the 
world,  were  now  done,  and  melancholy  had 
finally  triumphed.  His  cheerfulness,  which  sur- 
vived even  the  City,  his  memory  of  Matilda  which 
only  a  month  past  he  had  been  again  contemplat- 
ing with  a  warm  joyousness,  and  his  hopes  of 
yet  writing  happier  and  nobler  poems — all  these 
were  at  last  laid  aside  for  ever.  Of  his  poetical 
career,  the  rest  was  silence. 

It  is  both  painful  and  unnecessary  to  dwell  on 
the  last  two  months  of  Thomson's  life.  He  lived 
through  them  quite  alone,  the  unresisting  victim 
of  alcohol  and  insomnia.  His  old  courage  was  so 
completely  gone  that  he  seems  to  have  been  indif- 
ferent to  his  fast  approaching  doom.  Only  two 
occasional  verses  survive  from  these  months, 
both  poorly  written  bits  of  hackwork.  The  Old 
Story  and  the  New  Storey,  written  in  April,  is 
an  attack  upon  the  English  humanitarians  who 
were  objecting  to  the  unfair  cost  of  monarchical 
upkeep;  Despotism  tempered  by  Dynamite,  writ- 
ten in  May,  is  a  bitter  attack  upon  the  hateful 
tyranny  of  the  White  Tsar.  The  latter  is  the  last 
poem  Thomson  ever  wrote. 

Of  the  very  last  of  the  poet's  life,  all  his  biog- 

[  131  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

raphers    present    a    similar    but    vague    account. 
G.  G.  Flaws  wrote : 

"Let  it  not  be  misread  as  a  harshness,  or 
as  a  lightly  tripped-off  phrase,  when  I  give 
out  that,  in  all  verity  to  me,  his  later  life  was 
a  slow  suicide,  perceived  and  acquiesced  in 
deliberately  by  himself. 

"Even  his  friends  in  Gower  Street  lost 
control  of  him,  and  did  not  know  his  where- 
abouts. Thomson  was  so  reckless,  because 
his  visit  to  Leicester  had  ended  in  a  fit  of 
intemperance,  and  he  returned  to  London  in 
bitter  remorse  and  despair.  Percy  Holyoake 
was  looking  everywhere  for  him  on  June  ist, 
when  he  visited  Marston  for  the  last  time." 

Bertram  Dobell  has  added: 

"He  eagerly  anticipated  the  time  when  it 
(drink)  should  destroy  him.  .  .  .  How  he 
lived  during  the  last  three  or  four  weeks  of 
his  existence  can  only  be  conjectured,  for  he 
had  now  no  longer  a  regular  home,  but  slept 
in  common  lodging-houses.  Sometimes,  it 
is  to  be  feared,  he  was  numbered  amongst  the 
homeless  and  shelterless  wanderers  of  the 
streets." 

The  merciless  City  had  at  last  claimed  its  victim. 
William  Sharp  has  described  his  last  hours: 

[  132  ] 


LAST  DAYS 

"For  a  few  weeks  his  record  is  almost  a 
blank.  When  the  direst  straits  were  reached, 
he  so  reconquered  his  control  that  he  felt 
himself  able  to  visit  one  whose  sympathy  and 
regard  had  withstood  all  tests.  Thomson 
found  Philip  Marston  alone;  the  latter  soon 
realized  that  his  friend  was  mentally  dis- 
traught, and  endured  a  harrowing  expe- 
rience, into  the  narration  of  which  I  do  not 
care  to  enter. 

"I  arrived  in  the  late  afternoon  and  found 
Marston  in  a  state  of  nervous  perturbation. 
Thomson  was  lying  down  on  the  bed  in  the 
adjoining  room:  stooping,  I  caught  his  whis- 
pered words  that  he  was  dying;  upon  that  I 
lit  a  match,  and  in  the  sudden  glare  beheld 
his  white  face  on  the  blood-stained  pillow. 
He  had  burst  one  or  more  blood-vessels,  and 
the  haemorrhage  was  dreadful. 

"Some  time  had  to  elapse  before  anything 
could  be  done,  but  ultimately  with  the  aid  of 
a  friend  who  came  in  opportunely,  poor 
Thomson  was  carried  downstairs,  and  having 
been  placed  in  a  cab,  was  driven  to  the  ad- 
joining University  Hospital." 

The  next  day  Sharp  with  the  blind  poet,  Mar- 
ston, visited  Thomson  there.  The  last  recorded 
appearance  of  Thomson  alive  has  again  been 
preserved  by  Sharp: 

[  133  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

"Nor  can  I  ever  forget  the  look  of  pro- 
found despair  in  the  eyes  of  the  dying  man 
in  the  ward  at  the  University  College  Hospi- 
tal— the  despair  of  what  De  Quincey  has 
called  a  'blazing  misery,'  though  without 
relation  to  any  future  of  possible  weal  or 
woe." 

Salt  speaks  vaguely  but  kindly  of  the  poet's 
dying  words,  while  Sharp,  who  probably  heard 
them,  hints  with  painful  truth  that  they  were 
dreadful  to  hear.  No  one  has  preserved  them. 
Thomson  died  in  the  evening  of  June  3,  1882, 
two  days  after  the  fatal  attack  in  Marston's 
chambers.  Five  days  afterwards  he  was  buried 
in  the  Highgate  Cemetery,  in  the  same  grave 
where,  eight  years  before,  his  friend  Austin  Hol- 
yoake  had  been  laid  to  rest.  Only  a  few  of  his 
most  intimate  friends,  such  as  his  younger  brother, 
John  Thomson,  T.  R.  Wright,  Percy  Holyoake, 
J.  W.  Barrs,  Miss  Barrs  and  Marston,  were  pres- 
ent. With  Thomson  was  interred  a  locket  con- 
taining a  tress  of  yellow  hair,  his  one  memento 
of  his  lost  love.  Out  of  respect  to  the  dead  man's 
heterodox  views,  there  was  no  religious  service. 
Salt  has  preserved  the  burial  service  which  was 
adapted  for  the  occasion  by  Percy  Holyoake,  and 
also  the  "elegant  and  feeling  tribute  to  the  virtues 
of  the  man  and  the  genius  of  the  poet"  which  was 
delivered  by  Holyoake  at  the  grave.     At  last  the 

[  134  ] 


CRITICISM 

wistful  invocation,  which  over  twenty  years  before 
the  poet  had  made  in  Our  Ladies  of  Death,  had 
been  fulfilled  for  him : 

"Take  me  and  lull  me  into  perfect  sleep; 
Down,  down,  far  hidden  in  thy  duskiest 
cave; 
While   all  the  clamorous  years   above  me 
sweep 
Unheard,  or,  like  the  voice  of  seas  that 
rave 
On  far-off  coasts,  but  murmuring  o'er  my 

trance, 
A  dim,  vast  monotone,  that  shall  enhance 
The    restful    rapture    of    the    inviolate 
grave." 

This  is  the  end  of  Thomson  the  man;  the  end 
of  Thomson   the   poet   is   not  yet. 


[  135  ] 


CHAPTER  VIII 

CRITICISM 

rPHE  defense  of  a  poet  is  usually  poor  enough 
*■  criticism,  for  the  writer  must  at  once  plunge 
into  the  dust  and  heat  of  partizanship.  It  is  very 
difficult  for  the  advocate  to  weigh  evidence  rather 
than  shape  it  to  his  purpose.  Yet  in  the  case  of 
Thomson,  any  fair  and  intelligent  criticism  must 
necessarily  be  a  defense,  for  the  poet's  name  and 
works  survive  chiefly  as  horrible  hearsay  phan- 
toms. Men  who  have  never  read  a  word  of  his 
poetry  or  his  prose  gain  somehow,  year  after 
year,  the  general  impression  that  Thomson  was 
an  immoral  and  blasphemous  man  who  wrote, 
some  years  since,  several  very  pessimistic  poems  in 
a  rough,  harsh  style  that  quite  lacks  distinction. 
Be  it  our  task  to  inquire  into  the  more  significant 
phases  of  this  wan,  hearsay  reputation  which  the 
poet  at  present  possesses,  that  we  may  do  even  a 
scant  justice  to  one  of  the  most  original,  powerful 
and  sincere  poets  of  the  last  century. 

Something  has  already  been  said  of  the  melan- 
choly life  of  Thomson,  and  his  lingering  death 
from  drink  in  1882.  As  a  concession  to  the  habit- 
ually moral  critic  of  poets  and  poetry,  mention 

[  136  ] 


CRITICISM 

might  be  made  of  Coleridge,  Chatterton,  Byron, 
Poe,  De  Quincey,  Rossetti,  Swinburne,  and  per- 
haps Keats,  as  artists  whose  lives  were  not  clear 
from  an  even  fatal  indulgence  in  stimulants.  Yet 
Thomson  lived  for  the  most  part  within  his  own 
mind,  and  such  external  criticism  fails  to  arrive 
at  the  heart  of  the  man.  Like  Coleridge,  Thom- 
son became  fatally  absorbed  in  himself,  and  from 
brooding  upon  his  own  irresolute  powers  of  mind, 
became  a  pessimist.  Coleridge  in  his  Ode  on 
Dejection  had  written: 

"O  Lady!  We  receive  but  what  we  give, 
And  in  our  life  alone  does  Nature  live: 
Ours   is   her   wedding-garment,    ours   her 

shroud! 
And  would  we   aught  behold,   of  higher 
worth, 
Than  that  inanimate  cold  world  allowed 
To  the  poor  loveless  ever-anxious  crowd, 

Ah !  from  the  soul  itself  must  issue  forth 
A  light,  a  glory,  a  fair  luminous  cloud 

Enveloping  the  Earth — 
And  from  the  soul  itself  there  must  be  sent 

A  sweet  and  potent  voice,  of  its  own  birth, 
Of  all  sweet  sounds  the  life  and  element!" 

Thomson  came  to  know  the  truth  of  this  poem 
only  too  well.  Yet  his  brooding  melancholy  was 
largely  inherent  in  his  nature   from  his  earliest 

[  137  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

days.  Novalis  has  somewhere  said  that  "Char- 
acter is  Fate,"  and  in  Thomson's  case  the  epi- 
gram is  tragically  true.  His  love  died  early  in 
his  career,  his  youthful  religious  beliefs  were  so 
rigid  that  they  could  not  survive  the  inevitable 
doubtings  of  maturity,  a  life  of  action  was  pre- 
vented by  his  literary  tendencies,  his  literary 
labors  went  almost  without  notice  or  approval 
most  of  his  life,  and  he  could  not  identify  him- 
self with  Nature  because  of  his  self-awareness  and 
his  city  life.  Thomson  was  thus  unable  to  sink 
himself  into  any  external  interest,  and  so  save 
himself  from  his  terrible  self-analysis.  Under 
immediate  stimulus,  his  talk  and  his  letters  were 
almost  invariably  cheerful,  but  when  leisure 
allowed  him  to  ponder,  his  poems  were  usually 
dark  and  sorrowful. 

Yet  this  fatalism  of  his  is  not  at  all  ignoble.  It 
should  be  pitied,  not  reprehended.  Thomson  be- 
lieved when  his  despairing  mood  was  upon  him, 
that 

"I  find  no  hint  throughout  the  Universe 
Of  good  or  ill,  of  blessing  or  of  curse; 
I  find  alone  Necessity  supreme." 

Yet  until  the  last  two  months  of  his  life,  he  fought 
bitterly  against  the  inevitable.  Except  perhaps  in 
the  Lord  of  the  Castle  of  Indolence,  his  poetry 
shows  no  signs  of  the  Oriental  submission  to  Fate. 

[  138  ] 


CRITICISM 

Certainly  the  generation  which  reads  the  Rubaiyat 
of  Fitzgerald  with  relish,  can  scarcely  afford  to 
censure  the  heroic  struggle  with  Destiny  which 
Thomson  maintains  in  the  conclusion  to  the  City. 
Like  the  greatest  writers  of  his  race,  from  the 
unknown  author  of  the  Beowulf  to  Thomas 
Hardy,  he  never  ceased  to  oppose  Fate  with  all 
the  power  that  was  in  him,  and  the  passionate 
intensity  of  Mater  Tenebrarum,  the  Ladies  of 
Death,  or  the  City  is  a  tribute  to  a  mighty  cour- 
age. Since  he  would  not  bend,  he  broke  at  the 
last. 

Much  also  has  been  made  of  his  occasional 
cynicism,  as  in  Art  or  Vane's  Story.  These  cyn- 
ical passages,  however,  represent  merely  the  com- 
paratively infrequent  moments  when  he  found 
himself  too  worn  out  with  the  sad  difference  be- 
tween the  ideal  and  the  actual  world,  to  blaze 
with  his  usual  fiery  indignation  at  the  tragic  dis- 
parity. Although  he  lacked  any  sort  of  formal 
religious  faith,  few  poets  have  loved  the  truth  as 
much,  or  sought  for  it  as  eagerly.  Those  who 
have  called  his  clinging  to  his  dead  love  an 
immoral  weakness  need  to  be  reminded  of  Dante, 
Novalis,  and  the  Philistine's  habit  of  "marrying 
his  deceased  wife's  sister." 

As  to  Thomson's  blasphemy,  much  understand- 
ing is  again  needed.  Sincere  blasphemy  of  the 
kind  which  he  occasionally  wrote,  as  in  Fane's 
Story  or  Bill  Jones  on  Prayer,  is,  paradoxically 

[  139  ] 


'4 
i 

LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

enough,  the  sign  of  a  profoundly  religious  nature. 
There  is  no  casual  im*pudence  about  it.  The  poet 
had  been  unable  to  escape  his  early  upbringing  in 
an  atmosphere  of  original  sin,  total  depravity,  and 
all  the  other  morbid  horrors  of  Calvinism  against 
which  Burns  and  Carlyle  have  spoken  with  no  un- 
certain tone.  It  is  not  for  most  of  us,  who  smile 
at  Mid-Victorian  theology,  to  criticise  Thomson 
for  nobler,  wiser  and  more  acute  criticisms  of  it 
than  our  own.  Actually,  Thomson  was  never  an 
unreligious  man,  nor  could  he  for  long  escape 
spiritual  problems.  .His  blasphemies  were  caused 
by  the  failure  of  the  "actual  church  which  he  saw 
to  correspond  to  the  lofty  ideal  which  his  poetic 
idealism  had  created  for  it. 

Many  critics  have  objected  to  the  rough,  harsh 
style  of  his  poetry,  and  this  objection  cannot  be 
dismissed  so  lightly.  Even  William  Sharp's  charge 
of  "rhetorical  verbiage,  and  a  vulgar  recklessness 
of  expression"  is  not  without  foundation.  The 
poet's  use  of  archaic  and  original  words,  of 
double  words,  of  monotonous  epithets  and  imper- 
fect rhymes,  is  indeed  too  pronounced,  even  in  his 
mature  work.  Thomson  was  for  the  most  part 
self-educated  in  literature,  and  his  sense  of  poetic 
form  was  sometimes  more  mathematical  than 
artistic.  There  are  occasional  touches  like  those 
of  "Johnny  Keats,"  except  that  Thomson  sins  in 
clumsy  over-seriousness  rather  than  mawkish  pret- 
tiness.     Certain  phases  of  the  crudely  powerful 

[  140  ] 


CRITICISM 

and  earnest  style  of  Thomson's  poetry,  remind 
one  of  Carlyle's  prose.  Yet  this  charge  of  harsh 
diction,  true  as  it  is,  can  be  pressed  too  far.  In 
a  private  conversation,  Alfred  Noyes  once  re- 
marked to  me  that  Thomson  was  too  rough  and 
lacked  art.  Afterwards,  as  is  usually  the  case,  I 
thought  of  the  reply  I  should  have  made  at  the 
time.  According  to  the  old  Greek  myth,  out  of 
Chaos  came  order,  and  out  of  order  came  the 
Muses.  In  plain  language,  poetry  organizes  the 
world  in  order  to  extract  meaning  out  of  it.  The 
poet's  world  is  usually  consistent  because  it  has 
been  well  ordered.  Just  as  his  world  is  more 
regular  and  patterned  than  the  real  world,  so  his 
language  is  more  regular  and  more  patterned  than 
the  ordinary  unmetrical  language  of  prose  or 
speech.  Tennyson's  line  is  smooth  because  it  is 
expressing  a  world  which  he  has  smoothed  out 
beforehand.  Hence  it  comes  that  readers  expect 
the  poet  to  organize  a  meaning  out  of  the  world, 
and  consequently  write  rather  smooth  verses  about 
it.  But  Thomson  differs  from  most  poets  in  that 
very  often  he  is  attempting  to  express  Chaos,  and 
not  an  ordered  universe  at  all.  What  he  was  try- 
ing to  express  was  not  the  harmony  of  life,  but  the 
meaningless  discords  of  it,  and  to  do  this  success- 
fully uncouthness  is  absolutely  necessary.  So 
Lucretius  had  found  it  in  "De  Rerum  N<atura," 
so  did  that  master  of  poetic  technique,  Milton, 
find  it  in  the  Paradise  Lost  when  he  wrote  of 

[  141  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

"Rocks,  caves,  lakes,  fens,  bogs,  dens,  and 
shades  of  death — " 

Had  Thomson  forgotten  the  truth  of  what  he  was 
writing  for  the  mere  beauty  of  insincere  expres- 
sion, such  a  rough  stanza  as 

"The  world  rolls  round  for  ever  like  a  mill; 
It  grinds  out  death  and  life  and  good  and 

ill; 
It  has  no  purpose,  heart  or  mind  or  will" 

would  lack  its  powerful  sincerity.  Consequently, 
his  rough  lines  are  very  often  not  only  justifiable 
but  felicitous  in  expressing  what  he  was  attempt- 
ing to  express.  Despite  Tennyson  and  the  school 
of  Tennyson,  poetry  cannot  be  measured  only  by 
its  smoothness.  Browning's  assertion  of  much  the 
same  principle  finds  more  consent  now  than  it  did 
when  Tennyson's  influence  on  English  poetry  was 
supreme.  Thomson  satirized  this  insincere  over- 
smoothness  in  his  Real  Vision  of  Sin,  and  was 
usually  far  too  much  in  earnest  to  disguise  his  real 
meaning  with  a  bland  beauty  of  utterance.  In  this 
respect,  it  is  natural  though  unfortunate  that  he 
should  have  the  defects  of  his  qualities. 

Thomson  has  also  been  severely  criticised  for 
his  receptivity.  Critics  have  pointed  out  in  his 
poems  the  strong  and  successive  influence  of  Shel- 
ley, Browning,  Leopardi,  Arnold,  Dante,  Heine, 

«r~  •  ■ 
[  142  ] 


CRITICISM 

Swinburne,  Rossetti,  and  even  Tennyson,  espe- 
cially in  the  poems  written  before  1862,  and  dur- 
ing the  period  when  his  powers  were  maturing. 
Yet  such  imitation  is  indeed  the  general  rule 
among  young  poets.  But  as  he  grew  older,  his 
prolix  flow  of  rich  and  original  metaphors  was 
curbed,  and  his  best  poems  are  in  a  stern  and 
inevitably  powerful  style.  In  such  spirit,  at  least, 
In  the  Room,  the  City,  Weddah,  The  fire  that 
filled  my  heart  of  old  and  Insomnia  were  com- 
posed. Certainly  no  other  poet  in  English  litera- 
ture could  well  have  written  these  poems.  At  his 
best  Thomson  possesses  an  almost  unique  balance 
between  his  relentless  logical  faculties  and  his 
intense  and  sweeping  imagination.  Shelley  was 
too  imaginative  and  Browning  too  intellectual  to 
attain  such  Dantean  power  as  the  best  passages  of 
the  City  reveal.  In  fact,  the  resemblance  between 
Thomson  and  the  Florentine  is  not  as  superficial 
as  on  first  sight  it  might  seem.  Both  poets'  loves 
died  young,  to  both  the  universe  seemed  stern  and 
predetermined.  The  fact  that  one  took  a  single 
City  to  embody  human  life,  while  the  other  found 
it  necessary  to  employ  the  whole  known  universe, 
is  after  all  a  difference  in  degree  rather  than  kind. 
Thomson  once  called  Dante  "the  central  intellect 
of  the  world,"  and  consciously  imitated  his  style. 
In  Thomson's  several  experiments  with  terza 
rima,  and  in  his  frequent  allusions  to  the  great 
Italian,  the  younger  poet  shows  the  results  of  con- 

[  143  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

stant  and  intense  reading  of  the  Divina  Comme- 
dia. 

But  the  chief  and  perhaps  least  valid  of  the 
stock  objections  to  Thomson's  poetry  is  its  pessi- 
mism. That  all  great  poets  have  a  streak  of  this 
in  their  natures,  is  obvious.  That  Thomson's 
peculiar  pessimism  is  neither  ignoble  nor  his  only 
attitude  toward  life,  has  been  sufficiently  illus- 
trated. The  question,  therefore,  which  the  critic 
of  poetry  must  ask  himself,  is  whether  he  has 
expressed  this  feeling  fully,  sincerely  and  power- 
fully, and  few  who  read  Thomson's  best  poems 
can  deny  that  he  has  done  this. 

In  the  Proem  to  the  City,  as  well  as  in  many 
other  poems,  Thomson  declared  that  he  well 
knew  that  his  poetry  was  not  a  true  expres- 
sion of  the  lives  of  everyone.  He  did  not  wish, 
as  Swift  had,  to  kill  the  whole  human  race,  and  he 
declined  upon  reflection  to  kill  himself.  He  bore 
the  habitual  optimist  no  envy,  but  much  of  his  best 
poetry  he  addressed  to  the  "sad  confraternity" 
who  like  himself  wandered  hopelessly  in  the 
"dolent  city."  He  is  not  therefore  insanely  un- 
balanced at  all,  nor  does  he  exaggerate.  Dante 
could  never  have  written  the  Inferno  had  he  not 
also  been  capable  of  writing  the  Paradiso.  Thom- 
son's gloom  is  intense  because  he  could  also  re- 
joice greatly.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  very  few  of 
the  critics  who  shake  their  heads  in  disapproval 
over  his  pessimism,  ever  felt  half  the  beauty  or 

[  144  ] 


CRITICISM 

the  joy  which  Thomson  has  put  into  Sunday  up  the 
River.  According  to  these  men,  Thomson  must 
be  a  formula,  an  unswerving  type  of  something  or 
other.  They  cannot  seem  to  see  that  he  was  a 
man,  self-contradictory  as  any  living  man  always 
is,  constantly  wavering  between  joy  and  despair, 
a  love  of  beauty  and  a  hatred  of  life,  a  passionate 
yearning  for  his  dead  love  and  a  stern  desire  for 
oblivion.  Thomson  expressed  these  things  be- 
cause he  was  a  poet,  and  his  expression  of  them 
is  intense  because  he  was  a  genius.  His  pessimism, 
when  it  was  upon  him,  was  the  sincere  conviction 
of  a  man  of  industry,  high  ideals,  strong  will, 
sound  brain  and  great  poetical  ability.  It  cannot 
be  lightly  set  aside  by  men  who  dare  no  irrever- 
ence to  the  heath  scenes  in  Lear,  or  the  Male- 
bolge  in  the  Inferno. 

It  is  one  of  the  perennial  tragedies  of  literature 
that  Fate  sows  poets  frequently  on  barren  ground. 
What  Thomson  might  have  accomplished  under 
happier  circumstances  has  been  ably  conjectured 
by  George  Meredith,  the  greatest  critic  of  Thom- 
son's acquaintance : 

"I  had  full  admiration  of  his  nature  and 
his  powers.  Few  men  have  been  endowed 
with  so  brave  a  heart.  He  did  me  the  honour 
to  visit  me  twice,  when  I  was  unaware  of  the 
tragic  affliction  overclouding  him,  but  I  could 
see  that  he  was  badly  weighed.     I  have  now 

[  145  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

the  conviction  that  the  taking  away  of  pov- 
erty from  his  burdens  would  in  all  likelihood 
have  saved  him,  to  enrich  our  literature;  for 
his  verse  was  a  pure  well.  He  had,  almost 
past  example  in  my  experience,  the  thrill  of 
the  worship  of  moral  valiancy  as  well  as  of 
sensuous  beauty;  his  narrative  poem  W eddah 
and  Om-el-Bonain  stands  to  witness  what 
great  things  he  would  have  done  in  the  exhi- 
bition of  nobility  at  war  with  evil  conditions. 
"He  probably  had,  as  most  of  us  have  had, 
his  heavy  suffering  on  the  soft  side.  But  he 
inherited  the  tendency  to  the  thing  that  slew 
him,  and  it  is  my  opinion  that,  in  considera- 
tion of  his  high  and  singularly  elective  mind, 
he  might  have  worked  clear  of  it  to  throw  it 
off,  if  circumstances  had  been  smoother  and 
brighter  about  him.  For  thus  he  would  have 
been  saved  from  drudgery,  had  time  to  labor 
at  the  conceptions  that  needed  time  for  the 
maturing  and  definition  even  before  the 
evolvement  of  them.  He  would  have  had 
what  was  also  much  needed  in  his  case,  a 
more  spacious  home,  a  more  companioned 
life,  more  than  visiting  friends,  good  and 
true  to  him  though  they  were.  A  domestic 
centre  of  any  gracious  kind  would  have 
sheathed  his  over-active,  sensational  imagina- 
tiveness, to  give  it  rest,  and  enabled  him  to 

[  146  ] 


CRITICISM 

feel  the  delight  of  drawing  it  forth  bright 
and  keen  of  edge." 

Life  itself  is  a  dazzling  and  bewildering  whirl 
of  colors,  and  each  artist  who  would  paint  it,  must 
pick  from  it  what  hues  he  will.  Some  will  paint  it 
in  azures,  crimsons,  and  rich  purple  and  gold, 
others  in  dingy  drabs  and  greys.  In  so  far  only  as 
he  is  sincere  and  gets  a  meaning  out  of  its  irides- 
cent complexity,  is  he  an  artist.  And  this  also 
Thomson  knew,  for  he  has  written  in  his  intro- 
ductory note  to  the  Lady  of  Sorrows: 

"That  this  composition  is  true  in  relation 
to  the  author,  that  it  is  genuine,  I  have  no 
doubt,  for  the  poor  fellow  had  large  gifts  for 
being  unhappy.  But  is  it  true  in  relation  to 
the  world  and  general  life?  I  think  true,  but 
not  the  whole  truth.  There  is  the  truth  of 
winter  and  black  night,  there  is  the  truth  of 
summer  and  dazzling  noonday;  on  the  one 
side  of  the  great  medal  are  stamped  the  glory 
and  the  triumph  of  life,  on  the  other  side  are 
stamped  the  glory  and  the  triumph  of  death; 
but  which  is  the  obverse  and  which  the  re- 
verse none  of  us  surely  knows." 

Pessimism  may  prevent  Thomson  from  ever 
being  popular,  as  it  has  Leopardi  and,  despite  con- 
ventional sentiment  to  the  contrary,  Dante  him- 

[  147  ] 


LIFE  OF  JAMES  THOMSON 

self.  Yet  at  least  his  poetry  must  always  be  re- 
spected by  the  "judicious  reader,"  as  it  will  always 
be  understood  and  appreciated  by  such  as  them- 
selves have  "paced  that  dolent  city,"  overcome 
by  the  "melancholia  that  transcends  all  wit." 

Finis 


[  148  ] 


14  DAY  USE 

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